Day One | April 11th

Panel 1a | Lesbian Modernism I

Hannah Roche (University of York) Conceiving the Lesbian Hero: Radclyffe Hall, Adam’s Breed, and Modernism’s Queer Child.

In 1927, just a year before the publication and trial for obscenity of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s fourth novel achieved the unusual honour of winning both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Adam’s Breed (1926), which probes the psyche of a spiritually starved Italian-English waiter in Soho, raised Hall’s profile both as a writer and as a curiosity: public attention was drawn to the ‘distinctive figure in the literary world of London [who] is known everywhere for her Eton crop and her monocle’ (Daily News, 4th January 1928). Yet in spite of its considerable commercial success and remarkable critical acclaim, Adam’s Breed could not withstand the knock to Hall’s reputation dealt by the trial of The Well. Almost ninety years and a Virago Modern Classics edition (1985) later, Adam’s Breed has failed to secure a readership beyond the relatively small world of serious Hall criticism.

This paper calls for the recognition of Adam’s Breed not only as a significant modern(ist) novel but also as an altogether necessary precursor to The Well. Expanding the category of ‘lesbian writing’, my paper raises important questions about how and why we might read lesbianism as the focus of an ostensibly ‘straight’ (and linear) novel. I explore the ways in which Hall’s preoccupation with breeds, not only as a keen dog-fancier but more weightily as a proponent of homosexuality as a congenital condition, is played out in Adam’s Breed’s essentialist take on national ‘types’. The crisis of identity faced by the novel’s hero, Gian-Luca, foreshadows Stephen Gordon’s struggle with sexual otherness. At the same time, both Gian-Luca and The Well’s Mary Llewellyn threaten to undermine the value of any distinction based on immutable type or genre. By emphasising the necessity of national and sexual categorisation whilst including characters who extend the boundaries of such categories, Hall simultaneously establishes and destabilises a typology model that embraces the possibility of pure or complete breeds. In her tender portrayal of Gian-Luca, an ‘outsider’ who ultimately fails to live within an often cruel society, Hall purposely prepares her readers’ sympathies for her next protagonist: the startlingly different Stephen Gordon. Panel 1a | Lesbian Modernism I

Steven Macnamara (University of Nottingham) Radclyffe Hall’s Other Gay Novel: The Master of the House

Radclyffe Hall is most commonly associated with the lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), but this paper will argue that her overtly religious novel, The Master of the House (1932) is a queer text that has largely been overlooked by LGBTQ+ communities and academics. Published in response to the publicity and notoriety Hall gained through The Well of Loneliness trial and its subsequent obscenity ban, The Master of the House was a commercial and critical failure and remains one of her least discussed works. The reimaged Christ story appears a rather dry and dull prospect compared to the perceived salacious and controversial lesbian storyline of The Well of Loneliness. However, The Master of the House is a covert male love story: a novel that explores unrequited, unrealised and unspoken love between men in the period leading up to the start of the First World War. It can be seen in the manuscripts that Hall, anxious not to be associated with another scandalous homosexual novel after The Well of Loneliness, attempted to redact the gay subtext of the novel. However, the undeclared attraction, passion and sexual tension between her Christ figure, Christophe, and his cousin Jan, a John the Baptist figure, is still implicitly present in the published novel. The Master of the House offers an insight into how Hall, who is wrongly assumed only to be interested in lesbian matters, negotiated a love story between men using metaphoric deities at a time when Modernist literature was rejecting religion. This paper will draw on little-known manuscript evidence to suggest that The Master of the House is an unrecognised homoromantic novel and it will argue that it deserves to be more widely known within the context of modernist period queer culture. Panel 1a | Lesbian Modernism I

Elizabeth English (Cardiff Metropolitan University) Women Against the World: Margaret Goldsmith, Queer Biography, and Writing Women’s Lives.

If recalled at all, the writer Margaret Goldsmith is most often noted for her brief affair with Vita Sackville-West in 1928 and possibly the novel, Belated Adventure (1929), thought to be inspired by her lover. This literary amnesia is particularly unjust when one considers the fact that Goldsmith spent a significant portion of her professional life documenting women’s lives and achievements, both historical and contemporary. Goldsmith’s career was diverse and prolific: at one time or another she worked as a government economic advisor, journalist, translator, literary agent, novelist and biographer. This paper focuses in on Goldsmith’s numerous historical biographies. Traditionally a genre deemed fitting for the Victorian female writer and reader, the biography underwent something of a revolution during the 1920s and 1930s, with Lytton Strachey’s theory of ‘new biography’ undoubtedly paving the way.1 As Robert Graves and Alan Hodge note in their memoir of those years, over two hundred biographies were published in 1930 alone.2 Biographical series such as Gerald Howe’s ‘Representative Women’ or Hogarth Press’s ‘World-Makers & World Shakers: A Series of Short Biographies’, are indicative of the genre’s popularity and the increasing appetite for women’s histories. Between 1929 and 1938 Goldsmith published 13 biographical studies, writing about such figures as Florence Nightingale, Christina of Sweden, Marie Antoinette, Madame de Stael, Sappho of Lesbos, and Maria Theresa of Austria. Goldsmith’s writing should thus be understood as part of the movement to ‘rewrite history’, as Virginia Woolf advocated in A Room of One’s Own, or to incorporate women into that exclusionary narrative.3 Examining a number of her historical biographies, this paper argues that Goldsmith delves into the annals of history to retrieve figures whose queer sexualities have been occluded or misrepresented in the past — Christina of Sweden, Sappho, Marie Antoinette, and Frederick the Great, for instance. Goldsmith retells her subjects’ stories according to a distinctly modern and sexualised agenda, framing these portraits through anachronistic lenses such as sexology and psychoanalysis and thus taking liberties with masculine concepts of historical ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’. Such imaginative archaeological retrieval serves a dual purpose: it primarily provides the modern reader with a sense of queer sexual lineage and a greater understanding of the self, but it also tests the boundaries of how we define and construct history in relation to sexuality and gender.

Panel 1b | Out of Time: Queer Temporalities

Jade French (Queen Mary, University of London) Suspended Animation: Queer Temporalities and Ageing Bodies in Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women.

In Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), the reader often meets her protagonists waiting, decaying and passively dying. Anchored between decadence and modernity, these women seem placed at the apex of emancipation. However, compared to the hopeful spirit embodied in contemporaneous New Woman fiction, Barnes suspends her protagonists in a never-moving present and describes them in terms of ageing. Taking these contrasts as a starting point, this paper will situate Barnes’s collection as a queer alternative to the narratives of futurity embodied in the progress orientated ‘modern’ era. Through close- reading poems in the collection and drawing on Port’s notions of ‘reverse chronologies’ and Halberstam’s theories of queer time, I will suggest Barnes debunks the privileging of youth by making her young women old. Her language of decadence subverts the trope of the beautiful muse (often coded as lesbian) dying young by embracing and subverting ‘decline’ throughout her collection. Barnes’s poetry presents a sometimes tragic but ultimately vital alternative to ‘progress’, which clears a space for both queer and ageing bodies to exist outside of a youthful, heteronormative temporality. The paper will end by tracing parallels between Barnes’s early and late poetry, suggesting that she queers temporality through a ‘suspended animation’. By freezing moments of progress, Barnes creates a twisted Bildungsroman that renders her modern women unable to mature and yet already old. Overall, I will contend that Barnes radically rethinks queer, female relationships to time through the mode of the ageing body and in doing so, addresses an intersectional identity underexplored even in modern gerontological research.

Panel 1b | Out of Time: Queer Temporalities

Zofia Litwinowicz (St Andrews) Queer Chronotopes in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

In any literary work the notion of time is intrinsically related to the question of queer identity. According to P. Barry, queer literature, contrary to realist genres, subverts linear time narrative and introduces a plot and characters elaborated in non-cumulative and non-methodically arranged ways. This fluidity and uncertainty of time, combined with spatial anti-essentialism and deconstruction of the binary opposition between the heterosexuality and homosexuality, are vital for the establishing of queer identity.

Through the unification of queer time and space, the notion of a queer chronotope appears. The term "chronotope", coined by Bakhtin, illustrates the inseparable unity of time and space, "intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships". B. Keunen distinguishes teleological and dialogical chronotopes: the former move plot through conflicts towards final state of equilibrium, whereas the latter constitute a web of different axes that are juxtaposing and don't lead to any final moment. I would argue that the notion of dialogical chronotope is vital for understanding queer identity in a literary work due to its emphasis on fluidity and uncertainty of time and space.

Therefore, in my article I will analyse three dialogical queer chronotopes in Heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad: Marlow in Brussels before setting off to Africa ('the map"); Marlow on the boat going up the Congo River ("the boat"); Marlow encountering the Intended ("the Intended"). Since queer chronotope brings together the features of queer time and queer space, I will argue that all three chronotopes are characterised by crossing the boundaries, blurring established distinctions and reorganising fossilised heteronormative criteria.

Temporal uncertainty (the experience of Africa as "out of time") and deconstruction of linear time (overlapping of different temporalities), as well as the blurring of gender roles and the notion of escape from conventional male paradigms and heteronormative spatial constructs reflects queer identities of the novella's characters. I am going to demonstrate how Conrad’s use of non-linear, multiple narrative and dissolution of masculinity paradigms construct queer chronotopes and analyse the way the latter reflect Marlow's and Kurtz's queer identities and highlight Heart of darkness' homosexual undertones.

Panel 1b | Out of Time: Queer Temporalities

Stephanie Brynes (The University of Texas at Austin) No Man’s Land: Queer Time and Intimacy in Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.

Although the roman poilu, or infantry novel, is often excluded from French modernist scholarship, in fact it reprises many modernist motifs, including the interrogation of memory, particularly traumatic memory. While trauma scholars have theorized grief as a collective experience, Great War literature frequently defers to the trope of silence, or the failure of language to communicate soldiers’ experience of the war. Nevertheless, authors explored alternative methods to express friendship, intimacy, mass bereavement and commemoration during the interwar period. We must examine these alternative discourses, as they established and were shared by transnational communities of veterans at a time when national boundaries were critically enforced. This presentation identifies and explores one such discourse as it manifests in All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.

In this presentation, I argue queer time operates as a marker of alternative discourse which enables the expression of male intimacy and grief both diegetically and extra-diegetically. I interrogate the themes of temporality and friendship and argue Remarque’s treatment of these themes exemplifies Jack Halberstam’s concept of queer time. I suggest that by drawing on queer time, Remarque uses fiction to create a temporal No Man’s Land where hetero-masculinity and male intimacy coexist, unlike in the extradiegetic context, where male intimacy was often refused and/or silenced. I argue the portrait of male intimacy enabled by the use of queer time is not exclusively linked to expressions of homoerotic desire, but may represent varying levels of intimacy ranging from the homosocial to the homoerotic. At stake in this research is both a detailed analysis of the queer in Remarque’s novel and an exploration of how queer time provides new insight into the conflation of spatial and temporal language in modernist literature. I conclude with some thoughts on the function of the novel in a culture of mass bereavement and suggest the novel may serve as a transnational lieu de mémoire.

Panel 1c | You Wanna Talk About Reading: Form and Formalism

Ryan Tracy (The Graduate Center, CUNY) Efforts of Auto-Affection: Richard Bruce Nugent’s Queer Self-Feeling.

In Black Gay Man, Robert Reid-Pharr suggests that Gary Fisher’s depiction of black sexual subjection to white bodies is something of an anomaly within the “established idioms of Black (gay) cultural production.” This essay suggests that Harlem Renaissance writer, performer, and visual artist Richard Bruce Nugent might be considered something of a literary antecedent to Fisher, in that Nugent’s representations of sexuality and race have long troubled accepted codes for representing African American experience. Nugent’s writings are unorthodox, not only for their queer sexual content, but also for the ways they flout—in modernist fashion—conventional narrative modes for depicting Black desire and suffering. Nugent’s (gay) (black) modernism reaches a remarkable zenith in his short story “Pope Pius the Only” (1937), which remains perhaps singular in the way it depicts a scene of black suffering at the hands of a white lynch mob as a “reefer”-fueled stroll through Harlem (not to mention various other global locales). Impossibly told from a first-person perspective, this psychedelic, stream-of- conscious narrative recalls sexual cruising as a trope for reworking the traumas inflicted by white supremacy. By deploying the scene of lynching as a starting point for a narco-auto- affective revery, Nugent pushes literary decadence to its extreme limit of sense, thus producing a quixotic critique of racial and sexual normativity. Without uncritically idealizing such a strategy, this essay, nevertheless, argues for a renewed appraisal of the salience of aestheticism, decadence and modes of boredom as forms of utopian refusal within the Black literary tradition and beyond.

Panel 1c | You Wanna Talk About Reading: Form and Formalism

Sam Waterman (University of Pennsylvania) ‘To dig, to bake, to plant, to build’: Virginia Woolf’s Queer Adventure Work.

As part of a wider dissertation project on the queer adventures of the modernist novel from Richardson to Bowen, this paper reconceptualizes Virginia Woolf’s relationship to the literary tradition of male romance via a concept of queer labour common to both. Queer readings of male romance narratives from Defoe to Conrad typically read them as anxious symptoms of masculine homosocial desire. Queer readings of Woolf have by and large focused on same-sex desire and lesbian identity. However, Woolf’s critical and creative engagements with adventure narratives ask us to reconsider queer desire in both these traditions as yoked not to particular subjects or identities but to processes of labour. First unpacking Woolf’s own feminist-materialist reading of male romance in her critical essays, I will then turn to a reading of Mrs Dalloway to show how the language of adventure yokes the experience of work to an expansive principle of pleasure. In siding with the phenomenology of the working body over and against “the dark places of psychology” (Woolf), such adventurous pleasure punctures the interiority of the modernist novel of consciousness, drawing our attention instead to experiences of modernity that cannot be written into psychological modes. By developing such an argument, I will tell a different story about the affordances of adventure in the era of modernism, which are often diminished in (male) narratives of Conradian disenchantment or Jamesian interiorization, focusing instead on the queer opportunities that adventure could lend to new and unruly styles of desire. At the same time, I will ask what queer theory might learn by turning its attention to the literary languages available for narrating the experience of labour in modernity – whether domestic, administrative, intellectual or professional – and how labour itself might become the basis for new and adventurous imaginings of pleasure. Panel 1c | You Wanna Talk About Reading: Form and Formalism

Scott Streitfeld (University of California, Irvine) ‘Other Dubious Refinements’: The Young and Evil’s Queer Sociology.

At one point in Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s experimental novel, The Young and Evil (1933), Julian, one of the novel’s two queer protagonists, declares that “a taste for bad wine may be cultivated like sexual perversions and any number of other dubious refinements” (132). The ease of this analogy belies the novel’s complex thematic crossings between the sexual, the aesthetic, and the economic. Indeed, as if to anticipate the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Ford and Tyler’s bohemian characters obsess over the relations between sexuality, taste, habit, and literariness. Unsurprisingly, it is this concern that preoccupies Karel, the novel’s other protagonist, who at one point responds to a fellow gay writer’s urge to “put art in its place” by reminding him that “there is such a thing as sociology” (45). This peculiar assertion marks the novel’s simultaneous commitment to, and interrogation of, its own aesthetics. Ford and Tyler traveled in the same circles as, and consciously pay homage to, the fiction of Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein, going so far as to identify them by name. But just as important, formally, are their insistences on a queer literary aesthetic that serves as the foundation for a kind of “cultivated” value grounded in perversion. This paper examines The Young and Evil’s sociological treatment of this queer literary value in the context of modernism. Some accounts of modernism, such as Mark McGurl’s and Aaron Jaffe’s, have engaged with the sociological methods drawn from Bourdieu’s theories of the autonomization of the field of cultural production. However, the significance of queer sexuality to literary sociology has been under- theorized. Queer theorists and scholars of gay and lesbian literature in America have stressed the difficulties of historicizing queerness in pre-stonewall literature. Heather Love, Christopher Nealon and Scott Herring have debated about whether or not literary objects enable or cut off access to the legibility of queerness in the past. Similarly, Christopher Looby has gone so far as to question whether or not the novel, as a form, can represent queer desire at all. However, less considered in these approaches has been the relationship between the canons of twentieth- century queer fiction and, to borrow John Guillory’s formulation, the cultural capital that both enables and complicates the project of historicizing them. All the more interesting, then, is The Young and Evil’s relationship to both modernism and to the formation of a gay fictional canon. Published by the Obelisk Press in a limited edition in Paris, the novel fell into obscurity until its republication by the Arno Press in the mid-seventies. Amid the historical and archival unearthings of gay liberation, the novel’s complex linkages between sexuality and literariness take on new light, highlighting a tangled set of connections between modernism and queer American fiction.

Panel 2a | Natural Urges: Queer Ecologies

Thomas Houlton (Independent) The Queer Ecologies of Jocelyn Brooke.

Jocelyn Brooke’s semi‐autobiographical writing is best‐known in his well‐regarded ‘Orchid Trilogy’, in a style that Anthony Powell called “reminiscence lightly touched with fiction”. However, three of his more obscure works, The Scapegoat (1948), The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950) and The Dog at Clambercrown (1955), reveal a writer who seeks to produce and re‐produce the same autobiographical material through increasingly sexual, fictional and sinister modes.

Brooke returns again and again to the same Kentish locations, casting them in varying degrees of light and shade, with a cast of mostly male, military characters existing in rarefied, intense networks that criss‐cross the familiar hills and woods like queer ley‐lines. As such, each novel becomes a repurposing of the one that came before, revealing a nightmarish, homoerotic collaging in which the divisions between writing, sexuality and landscape become blurred and deconstructed, and where the individual novels themselves seem to collapse and re‐form together in new, non‐hierarchical ways.

Brooke’s work, positioned as it is between the end of the Second World War and the decriminalisation act of 1967, is itself searching for a space of homosocial bonds in a post‐war, demilitarised society, in a natural landscape that is created and shaped by (repressed) homosexual and homosocial love and the necessary murder or destruction of such male bonds. It represents a transitional period marking the “end” of modernism, and as such can bring new insight into our understanding of the often occluded history of “gay writing” during this time.

This paper will examine these lesser‐known novels by Brooke through the lens of queer ecocriticism and psychoanalysis, tracing how, through a repetition of landscape motifs and visual cues (for example the much‐repeated ‘erotic triangle’ formed by men’s unbuttoned shirts), Brooke’s writing can be seen to be rooted in a repressed, Edwardian past whilst at the same time occupying a sexually transgressive, violent present. In this way I shall trace the queer hybridity of these texts whilst revitalising the critical possibilities for close, queer, psychoanalytic and ecological reading methods, with Brooke’s literary texts seen as tools for world‐creation, of both the natural and psychic landscapes in which they find themselves, and which grow from them.

Panel 2a | Natural Urges: Queer Ecologies

Elizabeth O’Connor (University of Birmingham) Finding the New Eve: Ecofeminist Vision in H.D.’s Trilogy.

'Trilogy', H.D.’s three‐poem cycle written between 1942 and 1946, uses H.D.’s war experience as a basis to interrogate and renew tropes of human culture, using the destruction of war as an opportunity for poetry to create new myths that oppose previously accepted values.

H.D. alludes to biblical, Classical, Ancient Egyptian and pagan traditions as she questions their relevance and phallocentrism, culminating in the birth of a female spiritual leader, a Mary/Eve hybrid, whose arrival restarts the evolution of the world. The poems are often read through the lens of feminist revisionism, or as studies in war‐time trauma and the cathartic function of poetry; yet references to seas, plants, insects, birds and mammals construct an alternative thread of meaning throughout ‘Trilogy’ and have heretofore been overlooked. In this paper, I argue that nature and ecology form a pattern of ecofeminist resistance in the poem, upholding the poem’s feminist myth‐ making through images of the natural world, and binding H.D.’s post‐war gynocentric vision to environmental renewal.

The poem’s speaker renounces the ages of iron, steel, metal and bronze as they move through habitats and human history as a shellfish, earthworm and goose. My argument will take these three creatures and their elemental habitats (earth, water and air) as a structural basis to trace how the poem reveals H.D.’s desire to understand the world through the minutiae of nature, and to return to a symbiotic relationship with it. H.D. locates not only divinity and renewal through the natural cycles of seasons, death and evolution, but also aligns her female messiah to regenerative natural images like caterpillars, pupae and the sea‐tide. In ‘Trilogy’, I argue, H.D. explores female power and the natural world within the context of resistance and renewal, giving a new, louder voice to both; a new Eve joined by a new Eden.

Panel 2a | Natural Urges: Queer Ecologies

Jasmine McCrory (Queen’s University Belfast) Towards a Queer Ecofeminist Reading of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

This paper aims to reorient ecocritical studies of the works of Virginia Woolf towards the use of a queer ecofeminist framework. Whilst many scholars such as Bonnie Kime Scott and Christina Alt have examined Woolf’s ecologies through an ecofeminist framework, arguing for the mutual reinforcement of male/female and science/nature binaries, very few scholars have mapped these dualisms onto queer/non-queer binaries. Indeed, to date no scholar has conducted an extended queer ecofeminist critique of any of Woolf’s texts. This paper aims to answer Greta Gaard’s plea for a “systematic exploration of potential intersections of ecofeminism and queer theory”.

Gaard’s Towards a Queer Ecofeminism argues that “many systems of oppression [including sexism, classism, racism, and further speciesism] are mutually reinforcing”. Warren explains that value dualisms, such as male/female, reason/nature, production/reproduction, are ways of conceptually organising the world in binary, with each side of the dualism seen as exclusive and oppositional, with a higher value or superiority attributed to one aspect. In other words, one will project a deficiency onto the other to reinforce their own superiority. Gaard notes that one binary set, often neglected by critics, is the heterosexual/queer, or reason/erotic binary. Indeed, she notes that Western culture’s fear of the erotic, especially the queer erotic, is so strong “that only one form of sexuality is overtly allowed, only in one position; only in the context of certain legal, religious and social sanctions”. Thus, if all binaries are mutually reinforcing then to liberate the queer and the erotic we must first liberate all other forces that have been systematically oppressed, including nature.

Using this theory as a reference point, this paper aims to show how the ecologies of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway not only demonstrate her understandings of the intersections between female oppression and the oppression of nature, but also the parallel binaries between erotic/reason, queer/heterosexual. Undertaking extensive historical and biographical contextualisation, and locating Woolf within modernist gender arguments perpetuated by the likes of Lewis and Pound, this paper will specifically focus on floral motifs in Mrs Dalloway and how the reduction of wild flowers to domestic decoration represents wider social repressive patterns. It should be noted that this paper will look at Woolf’s floral symbolism in the context of her bisexuality, in comparison to scholars who often address her more ambiguously as simply “queer”. This paper shall be the first sustained queer ecofeminist critique of Mrs Dalloway.

Panel 2b | Brand New Ancients: Classical Influence

Abbey Rees-Hales (University of Birmingham) The Daughters of Bilitis: Pierre Louÿs, Jeanne Mammen and a Pseudo-Sapphic Hoax.

TBC.

Panel 2b | Brand New Ancients: Classical Influence

John Champagne (Penn State Erie) Primitively Queer: Italian Fascist Era Artists and the Archaic.

Emily Braun has argued that the aesthetic underlying Italian fascist art “was that of myth itself”. Other theorists concur: Sergio Cortesini suggests that with their “mythical and atmospheric scenes suspended in time,” the paintings of the Scuola Romana “reflected a mythical conception of history and rebirth” that coincided with the regime’s goals. According to Cortesini and Braun, one painter whose aesthetic aligned with this fascist vision is Corrado Cagli. Mauro Papa argues that a new fascist model of virility manifested itself in figurative painting “not only across classical stylistic cannons . . . but also across an explicit reference to primitive and archaicizing forms”. He adds that this archaicizing, primitive style drew on a renewed critical interest in Renaissance painters Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello – both of whom influenced Cagli, as well as other painters who produced images of the male body.

These attempts to identify myth with a fascist aesthetic ignore the way in which, prior to the invention of gay identity, queer men often understood their desire with reference to an archaic or primordial past. In her analysis of queer temporality, Heather Love argues, “Whether understood as throwbacks to an earlier stage of human development or as children who refuse to grow up, queers have been seen across the twentieth century as a backward race”. This homophobic charge of backwardness also enabled, however, a reverse discourse; “backwardness has been taken up as a key feature of queer culture.

This paper will analyze Italian fascist era artistic representations of queer desire that employed the trope of the nonmodern. For writers like Giovanni Comisso and Henry Furst, and painters like Cagli, Guglielmo Janni, and Filippo de Pisis, the discourse of the archaic or primitive provided the means of bringing into being a homoerotic subject. Unfortunately, the myth of homofascism -- the idea that fascism is “really” homoerotic -- is fanned by the fact that Mussolini’s regime also turned to the Italian past for inspiration; the “temporal splitting” characteristic of modernism was also characteristic of fascism. But in their own historical moment, these men employed a discourse of the archaic to understand their own queer desire. This discourse provided an alternative to the model of the homosexual as a “third sex.” It reminds us of what Eve Sedgwick called the unrationalized coexistence of competing conceptions of homosexuality.

Panel 2b | Brand New Ancients: Classical Influence

Mara Gold (University of Oxford) Beyond Sappho: Classics and the Construction of Modernist Lesbian Culture.

Classical women undoubtedly pervade western lesbian culture. From Sapphic magazines and Amazonian sports teams to the term “lesbian” itself, references to both historical and mythological figures first become commonplace during the late 19 th and early 20 th century, a time when an explicit lesbian culture was first emerging. This paper explores lesbian classical reception during this period, the place of classics in female homosociality and the formation of lesbian identities, relationships and networks. This paper examines classical references and their role in justifying lesbianism, something which influences lesbian culture to this day. Predominantly using archival research, this paper is not concerned with whether Sappho was truly queer nor in scrutinising the language used by the poetess and modernist writers who sought to imitate her, which have been covered extensively by scholars such as Yopie Prins (1999) and Jane Snyder (1997). This paper is instead concerned with looking beyond Sappho at the ways queer women reinvented the Classics to create a heritage and culture of their own, identifying a variety Greek heroines and mythological figures as their spiritual ancestors. Whilst many prominent lesbians of this era worshipped Sappho (including Renée Vivien and Natalie Barney) others looked to female homosocial groups, such as Maenads (including Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley). However, it is important to recognize that the burst in lesbian classicism came after the very first English translation of Sappho was published using the correct female (rather than male) pronouns in 1885. Therefore, the influence of Sappho can hardly be ignored.

In many ways, this new artistic, intellectual and social lesbian enlightenment paralleled male homosexuality and its ties to Hellenism, as explored by Linda Dowling (1994). However, Laura Doan (2001) and Martha Vicinus (2004) both gloss over classical connections in their otherwise detailed studies of early 20th century lesbianism, largely because they take social historical approach without connecting it to the work that modernist women were producing. In this paper, I attempt to bridge the gaps in existing scholarship and highlight that classical influences were just as important to modernist lesbian culture as they were to gay culture. During a period when women were forging their own place in society and successfully campaigning for women’s rights (particularly the right to vote and access to academic qualifications), women turned away from traditional patriarchal and colonial histories to create a heritage of their own. By creating a “herstory” based on great women of the past and reinventing the historically male and Upper-class Classics, feminists and queer women were not only able to justify their own standing but also make classics more accessible to the wider female public. In the same way, modernist writers and artists appropriated antiquity in their own works and used classical themes in a variety of ways to celebrate queerness. Like the classical heroines they idolized, modernist women’s classical reception was highly distinctive and deserves further exploration within a queer framework so that we might begin to unpick their complex identities.

Panel 3a | Butch/Femme

Rio Matchett (University of Liverpool) “You’re the buzz and I’m the sting” - Butch and Femme Performativity in The Little Review.

The editors of the Little Review magazine, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were deliberate in the performativity with which they conducted both their lives, and the editing of the magazine which would go on to be acknowledged as the quintessential modernist little magazine. In Autumn 1922, the magazine published a skit by Heap entitled ‘Gardening with Brains’, formatted as a play script, in which the “CHARACTERS: M.C.A and jh” (LR.9.1.33) speak to each other about the practicalities of horticulture, the editors being presented literally as characters for a stage. Within this, Anderson’s feminine presentation is paramount; she is described as wearing a “black silk Annette Kellerman, Limited; large white coral beads about neck, bracelets, short hair elaborately trained about elaborately indifferent head” (LR.9.1.33). Heap, by contrast is described only as being on her hands and knees in the soil. The contrast in presentation between these two women - co-editors who for a time shared a lesbian relationship - is evident throughout their professional and personal relationship. They published photographs of themselves, taken by Berenice Abbott, in which the viewer may be forgiven for thinking Heap a man, or Anderson a socialite heiress. The Little Review published sketches of Anderson by Heap, depicting the contrast between “the steed on which she has her picture taken” and “the insect on which she rides” (LR.3.6.15), further demonstrating their awareness of image and presentation, and simultaneously inviting the reader to see beyond that fourth wall to the machinations behind it.

This paper will examine the performatively gendered identities of Anderson and Heap as ‘femme’ and ‘butch’ lesbians, considering their attire as well as their modes of writing, and their disparate receptions. These identities will be considered as intersecting with the different class backgrounds, religions and nationalities of the two women. It will discuss the contextual development of the ‘feminine’, and demonstrate the parallels between editing a modernist magazine of art and literature, and the editing of one’s own gender presentation.

Panel 3a | Butch/Femme

Jo Jones (University of Manchester) ‘He is too beautiful for a man’: Male Femininities in D.H. Lawrence and Honoré de Balzac.

‘If English people don’t like what I write, and I think it's probable they won't, I shall settle in France and write for the French’, D.H. Lawrence stated as a young man. A great admirer of French nineteenth-century realists and naturalists, Lawrence’s modernist oeuvre could be positioned as a product of the French literary tradition: his explicit sexuality and refusal to self-censor are traits more at home in post-revolutionary France than in Edwardian England. My thesis argues that French literature and cultural norms had an undeniable influence on Lawrence in his early formative years, which affected his presentations of male sexuality and masculinity.

This paper will discuss Lawrence’s The White Peacock (1911) and Honoré de Balzac’s Sarrasine (1830), identifying how their presentations of male femininity, in a reading inspired by Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998), subvert the francophone adherence to a vive la difference approach to gender. I contextualise the anxiety in early nineteenth-century France which rejected an effete aristocratic masculinity, exemplified by the extinguished monarchy, as French society turned instead to a Hellenic model of manhood emblematic of democracy. Representations of feminine men, then, are beyond a strict and distinct gender binary and therefore invite derision. Ambiguously gendered male bodies experience a contradictory reception, however, and in my discussion of these men in relation to androgyny it is revealed that while their possession of male and female traits strips them of their virility, it also heightens the eroticisation of their effeminate bodies. A close reading of one of Lawrence’s notorious male bathing scenes in inevitable here, alongside Balzac’s depiction of the eponymous artist sculpting his beloved. Lawrence’s and Balzac’s subversion of gender is effected largely through visuality, and I consider drag, performativity, and the gaze as elements disrupting the gender binary, taking Angela Carter’s ‘Lorenzo as Closet Queen’ (1975) as a springboard from which to read Lawrence as a drag king. Balzac’s Zambinella metamorphoses from man to woman to man, but the palimpsest of gender layered upon The White Peacock’s Cyril is extensive: his evolution from man to woman to man and finally to woman again is illustrative of Lawrence’s identity as modernist, as he moves beyond Balzac to a more complex vision of gender. In keeping with the contradictory elements inherent to his work, my interpretation will require reading Lawrence against himself, pitting the idealised and ever-present phallus in his philosophy against the ambiguously gendered fem-male visible in his novel.

Panel 3a | Butch/Femme

Dagmara Kottke (Catholic University of Lublin) Hidden (B)identities in Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians.

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) was an English writer, poet and gardener. She is ranked as a modernist author among such famous writers as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, but nevertheless she stays in the background of those well-known ones. She is famous more for her controversial aristocratic life and love affairs with other women-writers than for her works. One of her lovers was Virginia Woolf, who introduced Vita to the Bloomsbury Group.

Compared to Virginia Woolf, who used innovative techniques such as stream of consciousness and the change of perspective, Vita seems less attractive as an author; the critics are interested more in her life than in her works. Vita and Virginia were different - not only as personalities, but also as writers. Vita does not experiment with the form; however, she is a modernist writer in terms of the content of her works. She writes about issues that are important in modernity, such as the position of the woman in the modern world, the inequality of sexes and instability of the gender's construct, and in this sense – by presenting some reactions to modernity in her works – she is a modernist writer. The topics discussed in Vita's novels are becoming more and more important nowadays, which makes her works worthy of the contemporary reader's attention.

The author, who herself was bisexual and practiced cross-dressing, explored the topic of the fluent gender identity in her works. However, as writing openly about the double identity or lesbian affairs was not permissible at the beginning of the 20th century, Vita used several mechanisms to discuss those topics, hiding them between lines so as to avoid scandals and public ostracism. The aim of this paper is to discuss the ways in which the author explores hidden bisexual identities in one of her novels, The Edwardians.

Panel 3b | The Queer Art of Failure

Mike Frangos (Södertörn University) E. M. Forster’s Dystopias: The Longest Journey, Queer Pessimism and the Future

In this paper, I read Forster’s anti-Bildungsroman The Longest Journey (1907) in terms of queer futurity and (anti-)sociality. Perhaps the most overtly queer of the novels published during his lifetime, The Longest Journey is by far the most pessimistic. A narrative of what Jed Esty has called “antidevelopment,” The Longest Journey rejects the conventional coming-of-age story of education and progress, narrating instead the failure of the main character Rickie to develop, concluding with his inevitable unhappiness and untimely death. Socializing in homoerotic aestheticist circles at Cambridge, Rickie later experiences a loveless marriage and is haunted by several ghosts of his past, including Stephen, his aunt’s ward (and half-brother), and Stewart, a Wildean aesthete and former friend from Cambridge. The novel is filled with literal and metaphorical ghosts: letters, memories, chance encounters and accidental deaths. So too, Rickie’s own fiction lives on after his death as an insistent reminder of the unfulfilled expectations of education and progress denied to the novel’s queer characters. In Forster’s most famous works, queer desire and aesthetics are thematized in the form of suggestions, potentialities, specters, gaps, or memories that are beyond repression or disavowal. Though Forster’s works typically eschew the decadence of Oscar Wilde or Thomas Mann in favor of a more conventional social realism, a queer perspective re-emerges in the authorial commentary that often interrupts and haunts the narrative voice in his texts, one that re-orients the utopian optimism of the fin-de-siècle dandy.

The unhappy queers in The Longest Journey, I suggest, are interesting precisely because they are left out of modernity, not citizens-in-the-making but Wildean exceptional individuals without a place in the reformist aspirations of progressive modernity. Forster’s later novel A Passage to India, famously concludes with the mysterious exclamation: “No, not yet,” an expression of the limitations of progress and an unfulfilled demand for justice. By contrast, The Longest Journey depicts what I consider a full-fledged queer dystopia populated by the ghosts of ruined lives and unfulfilled promises. Rejecting the utopian optimism associated with queer aesthetes such as Pater and Wilde, the many ghosts of The Longest Journey re-orient queer futurity in the emerging context of social liberalism and democracy (a development charted across Forster’s novels). If New Women and the working classes have a future in the developmental horizon of modernity charted in Forster’s major novels, queer futurity subsists in the form of a resistance to foreclosure, signaled by the incessant refusals of The Longest Journey’s many queer ghosts.

Panel 3b | The Queer Art of Failure

Kate Houlden (Anglia Ruskin University) Anna Kavan’s Queer Modernism in Who Are You?

The writing of British author, Anna Kavan has frequently been framed in modernist terms, her unsettling fictional worlds being likened to those of Kafka and her work being championed by Anais Nin amongst others. This paper concentrates on her 1963 novel, Who Are You?, which is set in an unnamed colonial locale assumed to be Burma, where Kavan was resident in the 1920s. Building on Jane Garrity’s prescient comment that the author’s writing is engaged with ‘the condition of modernity’ (Garrity 1994: 255), the paper makes a case that Kavan’s novella reflects the contradictory faces of capitalist modernity as reflected in the country in the early twentieth century. Like many of her works, Who Are You? evokes the suffering of a sensitive young woman trapped in a brutal relationship, bringing to life the violent dynamic between ‘the girl’ and her husband Dog Head. However, this paper concentrates on the pair’s respective interactions with the husband’s mysterious servant, Mohammed Dirwaza Khan, arguing that serious study of Kavan’s male characters has been occluded by a scholarly focus on her ubiquitous, troubled females. I therefore use queer theory to explore the author’s dissection of colonial masculinity, highlighting the anxious performativity and intersecting oppressions at the heart of such power. The most distinctive feature of Kavan’s text is its unusual format, whereby the story is told once, in detail, before immediately being retold, in more concise fashion and with some adjustments. Using the work of Judith Roof (1996; 2002) and Jack Halberstam (2005), the paper shows how this formal deviation reflects a concern with the failings of normative order — the bourgeois, heteropatriarchal colonial family in this case — and, in turn, the relationship of such failure to narrative disjuncture.

Panel 3b | The Queer Art of Failure

Margot Kotler (The Graduate Center, CUNY) “you need her still”: Misogyny, Disgust, and Desire in Djuna Barnes’ The Book of Repulsive Women

Queer texts of the past that evince negative feelings and non-identitarian formations of sexuality are often celebrated by critics who view them as registering resistance to the emergence of modern homosexual identity and the affirmative narrative of contemporary LGBTQ politics. Kadji Amin has recently argued in Disturbing Attachments that queer studies’ hasty idealization of negativity and deviance often glosses over politically unsavory aspects of earlier formulations of queer identity, a “purification of one’s object that relies on the repudiation of its relationship to normative social forces”. This problem in queer studies is of particular relevance to literary modernism, which coincides with the period in which identitarian conceptualizations of sexuality began to emerge. Indeed, Djuna Barnes is a contentious figure in queer and modernist studies for this very reason. Barnes is a lesbian icon whose portraits of society’s outsiders and underworlds also share ideological and aesthetic investments with fascism. While critics have examined the ambivalence of Barnes’ politics in Nightwood (1936), they are less often considered in relation to her early journalism and poetry, which is often considered juvenile, imitative, and low-brow. This paper will examine Barnes’ The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), a chapbook of eight “rhythms” and five drawings, done in a Beardsleyesque and Baudelairean style, that features voyeuristic portraits of various “types” of women whose femininity is alternately excessive, inadequate, and deviant. Critics have historically repudiated the text on aesthetic and political grounds – a response to Barnes’ somewhat anachronistic use of misogynistic, decadent tropes – but they have more recently begun to argue for the inclusion of the text in a canon of queer literature, a recuperative move that downplays the text’s potentially problematic politics.

In contrast to redemptive readings of the text, I take seriously Barnes’ reliance on decadent tropes about women and lesbianism, such as their association with vice, decay, and non- reproductive sexuality. I will argue that Barnes knowingly deploys the affect of repulsion as an aesthetic judgment that brings objects into tension through the violence of distaste. Repulsion describes the way that the disgusting, which is often gendered, simultaneously engenders a compulsion to turn away and the desire to keep looking. Through Barnes’ use of decadent tropes and her queering of the relationship between the reader and the text, she forces readers to recognize their complicity in the objectification of women. Readers can no longer maintain aesthetic disinterestedness, but are compelled to recognize, via the representation of lesbianism as disgusting, that women too might desire women in ways that can be complicit in women’s oppression. This demonstrates how desire brings readers, and critics, into intimate contact with politically and aesthetically “bad” objects. I will ultimately suggest that Barnes offers a way of thinking through queer critical and affective attachments to politically “problematic” queer texts of the past.

Panel 3c | Histories and Herstories

Lexi Turner (Independent) The (Queer) Science: Nietzsche, the Theatre of Sadomasochism and Dionysian Eternal Recurrence.

For many readers, Nietzsche exists as a philosophical paradox – a classicist in his studies, his writing contributes to and comments upon the notion of a break from tradition establish him as one of the driving forces of the modernist era. And yet, the greatest appraisals and analyses of Nietzsche’s work are at the hands of postmodernists and poststructuralists, not least of all Deleuze, Foucault and Butler. Such a paradox may be paralleled in the very concept of a Queer Modernist inquiry, considering that, by many accounts, queer theory is itself all but entirely rooted in postmodernist thought.

A solution to these paradoxes may be found through further investigation of the elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy that held such influence over postmodern theory: that of time. Between Deleuze’s reflections and elevation of Nietzsche’s proposition of eternal recurrence to the status a legitimate cosmological theory of the repetition of difference-in-itself and the continuation of generalities, and Foucault’s discussion of genealogy as analysis of the historical implications of incorporation, we break free from linearly chronological constraints.

Similarly, Elizabeth Freeman argues, queer sexual interaction, through the medium of the historically “theatrical” roleplaying sadomasochistic encounter, “us[es] the body as an instrument to rearrange time, becom[ing] a kind of écriture historique,” creating sensational echoes of the results of penal discipline centuries before, now abstracted into pleasures of repetition, within and despite the cyclical recurrence of kyriarchal generality.

Applying through queer performance and sexuality Nietzsche’s philosophy in relation to the body and time, as well as remarking on the distinct similarities between Nietzsche’s theory of incorporation and Butler’s work on gender performativity, Nietzsche’s relationship with dance and musicality on his own literature becomes reinvigorated from a queer perspective. We may ask how the drag balls of Paris is Burning up to today, with their eloquent investigation of the power relations inherent in gender expression, relate to the modernist ballet, according to Susan jones, deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s “rediscovery” of the Dionysian.

Ultimately, we must ask: in a world of queer-historical erasure at the hands of cisheteropatriarchal hegemonic generality, how may we as queers understand differently the call for affirmation Nietzsche makes in relation to the supposed horror of eternal recurrence?

Panel 3c | Histories and Herstories

Lauren Abruzzo (University of Birmingham) Excluding the Included: Rethinking Sexual Deviancy in The History of Sexuality.

In this paper, I argue that the making of the ‘abnormal’ individual through exclusionary punishment in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish can also be applied to the making of the sexually ‘perverse’ in The History of Sexuality, rethinking the author’s view that sexual types serve to include ‘deviants’ in society.

In Discipline and Punish, individualization arises out of subtle forms of penality that repeatedly target a person in her various social spheres. This pervasive disciplinary power classifies wrongdoers as ‘abnormal’, separating them from ‘normal’ members of society. The making of individuals through discipline involves normalization according to a standard defined by the extent to which one’s character is deemed ethical. On the outer edges of this normalization curve are the ‘abnormal’ people, whose specification serves to “measure gaps” between them and the standard and exclude them from an ideal of goodness (Foucault 1995, p. 184). According to Foucault, the result of excluding criminals is homogeneity in the population.

By contrast, individualization as establishing sexual types in The History of Sexuality takes place not through punitive mechanisms but rather a scientific specification. Sexual ‘abnormalities’ are included (not excluded) by virtue of society’s urge to label their existence. Their ‘deviancy’, though assumed unethical, unnatural, and therefore disgraceful, becomes included insofar as it provides an analytical categorization. Groups such as gay and bisexual people, for example, obtain names that legitimize their positions as subjects of discourse. As a result of this inclusion via social classification, the population becomes a heterogeneous mixture of identities.

Based on Foucault’s two theses described above, I contend that we can understand labeling of the sexually ‘abnormal’ in The History of Sexuality as exclusionary by the standards described in Discipline and Punish. I make this claim by showing how moral accusations innate to sexual divisions express ‘perversion’ as somewhat criminal. Sexual classification stemming from claims about ethicality discipline a person’s character and create divisions in relation to a (moral) standard. What I mean is that subtle messages—such as reduction of queer identities to stereotypes, lack of accurate and celebrative representation in media and literature, and discrimination in professional opportunities, healthcare access, and education—tell us that being queer is wrong. We are also told this explicitly through claims that impose moral significance on queerness. And these ethical suppositions target queer people of color and other marginalized identities even more harshly. Labeling queer sexualities creates isolation of this group in contrast to the heterosexual norm; the fact of immoral sexualities elucidates the moral one. Ethical condemnation therefore plays an exclusionary role (according to the definition in Discipline and Punish) by distinguishing individuals based on supposed moral status.

My paper employs the author’s analysis in Discipline and Punish to inform his view in The History of Sexuality and concludes that elements of sexual labeling clearly operate under a principle of exclusion rather than inclusion by Foucault’s own standards. My argument does not criticize or reject sexual classification but rather suggests a problem for Foucault’s thesis in The History of Sexuality.

Panel 3c | Histories and Herstories

Ioanna Kostopoulou (Humboldt University of Berlin) C.P. Cavafy’s Slight Angle to Historiography and Desire.

The relation between history and fiction offers a possibility to approach the production of (literary) narratives and the formation of poetics either in terms of interaction and/or in terms of distinction. Based at first on the dichotomy “(historical) truth/ (literary) fiction”, “objective/subjective”, literary theory has explored ways to decode, deconstruct and question the traditionally claimed clear distinction. The chosen contribution of “history” in the production of a “literary” text seems often to translate into the use of the power of parody and into past reconstruction through a history of problematic, fragmentary memory or even forgetting. Even though this doubled discourse is a key moment for postmodernism theory and marks the need for a conceptualization and organization of knowledge as for instance the term “historiographic metafiction” (Huncheon) manifests, the interaction between historiography and modern (literary) fiction remains an unexhausted topic.

The question at this point is in how far the statement that literature emerges within the archive – an archive that is literary and historical – can also describe modern poetry around 1900. Furthermore, when it comes to the poems of C.P. Cavafy, who programmatically claimed to be a poet-historian and was in search for margins and remains of history in order to create his fiction and, by doing so, to construct his own Greater Hellenism, the interaction between history and literature is enriched by the poetics of sexuality and desire. E.M. Forster’s metaphor, wherein Cavafy stands “at a slight angle to the universe”, might provide a clue to his positioning to the (historical) world and at the same time to sexuality itself.

After Cavafy was either pathologized or desexualized by literature critics (from Malanos to Giatromanolakis), recent research suggests sexuality as a driving force in his poetics, inseparable from his (historical) consciousness and his understanding of troubled subjectivity through marginalization. Accordingly, this suggestion underlines once again a necessity to understand the Erotic Poems not merely as supplement to the Historical Poems, a necessity, the poet himself was aware of, and which became an obstacle, for he wouldn’t approve the preference of Historical over Erotic Poems in case of publication.

At the same time, the identification of “the homosexual Cavafy” (Papanikolaou) cannot rely only on the Erotic Poems; the relation to a modern sexuality discourse makes the discussion of the Historical Poems indispensable. It remains to be seen how desire plays its part in the composition of (sexual/historical) identity and his poetics. Desire in Cavafy has already been seen as “Greek” (Dellamora) and categorized as a characteristic of a “homosexual elite” (Jeffreys) in the cosmopolitan Alexandria of around 1900 – implying an elective affinity with figures like Oscar Wilde and identifying them as a kind of role model at the other end of the British Empire. Nonetheless, it is a desire which can’t be described by the use of attributive adjectives but rather by observing the poet’s fascination for decline, depravation – even “inversion” (Cavafy), and his sensibility for memory and rememberance of the marginalized.

Panel 4a | Strange Flesh: Cooking, Eating, Animals

Seabright D. Mortimer (Independent) ‘It was not at night it was in the morning’: Queer Temporalities and Animal Bodies in Gertrude Stein’s Paris France.

Gertrude Stein’s Paris, France was written in the years between 1939 and published in 1940 the day Paris fell to the Germans. The poignant date of publication befits a book that has been called Stein’s book ‘about time and place’. My paper will address the treatment of temporality and queerness in the book. Here I use queer for its relation to sexuality as well as its definition as odd, strange, funny and uncanny. We learn of a new pervading temporal character in the book: ‘war-time’. War time produces a profound effect on identity, both national and personal and is mediated by Stein in the form of pithy and heartbreaking epithets. ‘A dog was more likely to kill a chicken in war-time than in peace-time’ she tells us. We learn that selves shift and slip in war time, that people take on different forms and animals behave differently. As well as analysing Stein’s interest in non-linear ageing processes and queer adolescence I will also look at how she uniquely personifies both the century, the nation she inhabits and the animals in it in a writing style which is at once grave and flippant.

Gender is proved something hybrid and chimeric when Stein comments on the chic androgyny of boys names in France ‘the French like to call beasts up to date names, names of people don't change that much but they like to follow the fashion in animals names. It always pleases me that French boys are often called Jean-Marie ... and that is civilised and logical and might be fashionable, it has always existed.’ Linguistic chimera is also employed by Stein to describe how wartime has discoloured the ecologies of rural France.

‘One day, it was not at night it was in the morning, Emil was not there but his dog Ellen was there and Helen saw him. It was not true of course, it was not true but Helen said to herself, I was watching and the dog Ellen was changing and her fur turned into large baggy trousers and her head turned into a large shaggy head and it was a man, an enemy man’. (86)

War has altered the character of human and non-human animals and produced grotesque coagulations of the two. Animals are social inventions and as this passage demonstrates - individuals we project our desires onto. The Darwinian model of survival of the fittest suits a wartime ecology. A nature that is ‘red in tooth and claw’ lends itself to the kill or be killed mentality of war. But what in Stein’s book gestures towards a queerer assumption of animal/human kinship? One that might foreshadow 21st century eco-feminist models of webbed ecologies. ‘Emil was not an orphan. He had a horse.’ (89). I will use my paper to introduce Natalie Jeremijenko’s work on mutualism and talk about her questions ‘what do mutualistic systems look like?... what’s been left out of our cultural stories about nature?’ In relation to Stein’s text. The book sends up discriminatory borders between nations, genders and species in wartime whilst at the same time investing a lot of faith in cultural stereotype. The French invented the 20th century Stein admits, and because of this fact it cannot fail them. The timezone of ‘Paris, France’ is wartime and its units are measured in the faith of its citizens. Couched in Stein’s representation of wartime temporal ecologies I will take time to discuss recent writings on war. Using contemporary testimony alongside Stein’s text I will examine non- linear temporality in period’s of national crisis. ‘This country is a century behind if not more’ says a doctor reporting on the current crisis in the Yemen. What does it mean to steal a century from a country? To take time away? Or in the case of Stein’s book to queer time? With what language and in what language can we tell the time in war time?

Panel 4a | Strange Flesh: Cooking, Eating, Animals

Nanette O’Brien (University of Oxford) ‘That is what cooking is’: Gertrude Stein’s Intersectional Culinary Writing.

Critics such as Richard Bridgman, Lisa Ruddick, Mary Wilson, and others envision Gertrude Stein’s obscure work as encoding the expression of her sexual identity (and its troubling presentation and entanglement in racial politics). It is also possible to read Stein’s obscure style as re-inventing and drawing on the creativity of domestic characters in her writing. Stein’s linguistic innovations point to the kinds of intimate domestic work a cook performs—reducing, simplifying, complicating, and making new creations daily. This paper reads Stein as affiliating herself as an artist with the creative powers of the cooks in her work and life.

I contend that, in addition to her self-representation as a singular, masculine genius affiliated with the work of Picasso and Matisse (as argued by Barbara Will and others), Stein locates modernist authority and creativity in the domestic sphere, through conversations and tastings in the kitchen and through representations of her cooks. By lifting culinary language and figures into both her ‘hermetic’ texts and her ostensibly less difficult texts, she is able to treat the issues of identity and creativity with modernist seriousness. In its break with linguistic conventions, Stein’s writing also draws on modernist primitivism and ventriloquism, a ventriloquism that becomes disconcerting in the context of race. Using biographical and historical analysis alongside close reading to illuminate Stein’s Three Lives (1909) and a little-known short story, ‘Butter Will Melt’ (1937), I show how Stein problematically engaged with race while at the same time how the art of cookery presented opportunities for Stein to navigate themes of creation within the home.

Maria Christou (Oxford Brookes) Queer Food.

This paper will unearth intriguing uses of food in modernist literature. In doing so, it will flag up an underexplored but crucial connection: it will show that such ‘othering’ of everyday materiality – as this is encapsulated in the act of eating – is in conjunction with an ‘othering’ and a reconfiguration of the normatively sexed body. While it is perhaps Gertrude Stein’s and Alice B. Toklas’s alimentary engagements that are likely to first come to mind in this context, my paper will concentrate instead on an author whose work has not been previously read from such a perspective – namely, Georges Bataille. More specifically, I will focus on Bataille’s Story of the Eye, a pornographic novella in which what is usually taken to be food does not feature as such, and vice versa; in the same gesture, body parts and organs (sexual or otherwise), which are not usually used for the ingestion of food, here appear to assume just this role. The paper will show that such an attempt to make things and body parts function in alternative ways bespeaks an ontological vision based on the materiality of the here-and- now; a situation in which what a thing or being is depends on what it does, how it acts. In ascribing alternative roles to body parts and their engagements with one another and with material objects, Bataille radically reconfigures the sexed body in a variety of notable ways which the paper will explore, fleshing out their ultimately not-so- radical consequences.

Panel 4a | Strange Flesh: Cooking, Eating, Animals

Nicola Angeli (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) Colette, a Cat and a Man: a “Zoopoetical” Approach.

Published in 1933, Colette’s La Chatte re-elaborates the topos of the love triangle in modernist terms (see Schehr, 2009). Alain, an upper class young man, is the “bone of contention” between Camille, his despised wife, and Saha, his beloved cat. Camille’s failed attempt to kill the cat causes the wreck of her socially encouraged but unsatisfying marriage. As a result, Alain and Saha can finally regain the exclusivity of their mutual affection.

The figure of the cat has originated a conspicuous amount of interpretations, most of which seem to insist in either an allegorical or a psychological reading. The first one interprets the cat as an allegory for transcendental love, whose illusory quest leads Alan to interrupt his mundane marriage (Rémi- Giraud, 2005). The second one turns the cat into a projection of Alain’s hypertrophic inner child, who prevents him from engaging successfully with the challenges of adult life. In either case, by reducing it to a narrative device for staging Alain’s own conflictual characterization, such readings deprive the cat of any substantial alterity and flatten its animality (Dauphiné, 1989). The cat remains “a cat” only on the literal surface of the text.

This paper proposes a reading of La Chatte based on the analytical framework of zoopoetics, as defined by Anne Simon. By restoring the cat’s animal alterity and agency this paper attempts to bypass allegorical and psychological anthropomorphizations, so as to bring to the surface the radical queerness of the novella. Indeed, close readings of the text help frame the love between Alain and the cat as essentially queer, in the sense 2 that it develops outside heteronormativity and problematizes it. To conclude, the paper attempts to show the complex intersectionality of such queerness, that is to say, how the emotional relationship between Alain and his cat is articulated by means of their different biological identities and, at the same time, how their biological identities are articulated by means of their relationship.

Panel 4b | Unspoken Feelings: Art Beyond Words

Chuensumon Dhamanitayakul (University of York) ‘A Hybrid Monster’, a Visual Pun and a Trompe-l’oeil: Revisiting the Life and Art of Dora Carrington.

‘I have been suffering agonies because I am a woman. All this makes me so angry, & I despise myself so much’. Despite her shame over and disgust with any palpable physical reminder of her femininity, painter Dora Carrington at the age of 24 posed naked as a free-spirited ‘living statue’ at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire in 1917.[1] Carrington’s intimate connection with Bloomsburian literary lion Lytton Strachey (known for his homosexual nature) and her sexual attraction to both men and women render her an obvious choice of subject for recent gender and queer studies. Drawing from friends and her biographers’ accounts of her ‘domestic manager of the household with Strachey’ and her own diffidence that frequently ‘thwarted her ambition to paint’, prevailing feminist debates about Carrington focus predominantly on questions of whether she is a passive victim or a subversive, active critique of her days.[2] Such discourses tend to pin her down on either side of the binary of active/passive or subject/object or maker/made. This paper, by putting an emphasis on contrapuntal rhythms of reserve and disclosure, pleasure and shame, primness and exuberance, seeks to draw attention to one particular trait of her work and self-construction, her disposition towards a play of interchangeable meanings. In other words, it aims to demonstrate that Carrington’s modes of identification are far more interesting and complex than are currently acknowledged. The lingering aura of trickery and playfulness that persistently clings to Carrington’s presentation of a ‘self’ to an outside world suggests her penchant for oscillating between binaries rather than suppressing or hiding one identity under the other, or using one identity as a mode of escape from the other. Through a close analysis of three examples of her visual and verbal rhetoric in chronological sequence, this paper illustrates that Carrington always opts for variable rather than hegemonic patterns, although hugely selective in doing so. The first example is an excerpt from her correspondence with her lover Gerald Brenan. The second and the third examples give way to Carrington’s artistic attempts, first is her most frequently cited landscapes, Mountain Ranges from Yegen, Andalusia (1924) well known for its blending of the facts of visual perception with interior desires and fantasies and the second a trompe-l’oeil window, The Cook and the Cat (1931), the last surviving painting of her life. Conjugating a close textual analysis with biographical readings, this paper also takes into account the sociocultural context of England between the 1910s and 1930s, when the blurring of traditional gendered roles offered women a hitherto unimaginable mobility and independence, but simultaneously drew them back into a traditional heterosexual matrix.

Panel 4b | Unspoken Feelings: Art Beyond Words

Rachel Ashenden (University of Glasgow) Queerness and Collage in Claude Cahun’s Surrealism.

This paper uses Claude Cahun’s (1894-1954) writings and photomontages in Heroines (1925) and Disavowals (1930) as a focus for examining the ambivalence of collage, mythology and queerness within Surrealism. It sets Cahun’s striking work and insights on lesbian subjectivity within the context of Surrealism as a movement founded on male heterosexuality, which was exacerbated by leader André Breton’s homophobia.

Situated on the periphery of the Surrealism art movement, which feminists regard as ‘the radical other of modernism’, Cahun inhabited an amalgam of diverse identities; she was French, a Jew, a lesbian, and an anti-fascist activist amidst Nazi uprisings. Since François Leperlier’s rediscovery of her existence, and publication of her biography in 1992, there has been a demand to excavate the work of overlooked women Surrealists to renew our view of the historical avant-garde. This can be achieved by examining Cahun’s photomontages as a collaboration with her life-long relationship with her stepsister Suzanne Malherbe.

I will establish the Surrealist technique of collage as an effective strategy to represent Cahun’s and Malherbe’s culturally marginal partnership. We cannot credit sections of the photomontages to Cahun and Malherbe individually because their work was collaborative. Importantly, I will not claim that there is an essentialist basis for a relationship between lesbianism and a particular art form. But, I will argue that collage appealed to women Surrealists as a strategy to subvert phallogocentric Western artistic traditions.

This will lead to a discussion of how Cahun’s and Malherbe’s employment of collage is about the queering of female ancient mythical creatures. This is a revisionist enterprise, which counterpoints the male Surrealists who transformed women into ‘inexplicable creatures’ with the purpose of consigning femininity into the realm of the unknowable and illogical. This follows the mythological tradition which involves the fracturing of the female body, and its conjoining with animal parts.

Panel 4b | Unspoken Feelings: Art Beyond Words

Kirsty Clark (Guildhall School of Music and Drama) Seeking a Queer Aesthetic in the Performance of Paganini's Caprices on the Viola.

Masculinity, Virtuosity and the Viola: towards a queer viola performance of Paganini’s 24th Caprice This paper explores one way in which classical music performance could be queer performance: that is, performance that challenges norms of gender and sexuality. It seeks to highlight masculine aesthetics within virtuosity, such as control, and domination of the instrument, using Paganini's 24th caprice as a case study. Paganini was surrounded in myths of sexual promiscuity, gendered violence, and occultism (Kawabata), and this paper shows how the mythology of the man continues to inform the interpretations of some performers of his music today. Paganini's works are included in many major violin and viola competitions: this situates Paganini and his music firmly within the musical canon and establishes virtuosity as a desirable aesthetic for the competitive violinist or violist. The inclusion of Paganini's Caprices in viola competitions is one example of violists performing transcriptions where solo viola repertoire is lacking in the canon. I find a queer potential in the way the viola must make editorial decisions and physical adjustments to 'fit' these transcriptions onto an instrument for which it was not originally written. This experience of the violist having to make physical and musical negotiations mirrors the way a queer subject must negotiate social space in which they are 'obliquely' situated in relation to the 'straight lines' of heteronormativity (Ahmed, 2006)): both the queer subject and the violist cannot comfortably fit into the social or musical space they occupy and must go ‘off course’ in order to ‘fit’. To conspicuously ‘go off course’ as a queer violist performing Paganini’s 24th Caprice, I use drag makeup and men’s clothing while exaggerating the musical and physical gestures associated with Paganini’s virtuosity to highlight simultaneously the performativity of masculinity and gender in general and the history and present of hypermasculine associations with virtuoso performances.

Panel 4b | Unspoken Feelings: Art Beyond Words

Eleanor Jones (King’s College London) Barbara Ker-Seymer: Capturing Queer Intimacy in Modernist Interwar Photography.

Barbara Ker-Seymer was a radical British photographer active during the interwar years. After studying at the Chelsea School of Art in the early 1920s, she worked as an apprentice with her once- girlfriend, the society portraitist Olivia Wyndham. In 1931, she established her own photography studio, which she later described as ‘a marvellous playground’ for herself and her friends. Ker- Seymer simultaneously embraced and experimented with the prevailing formal and stylistic techniques used by modernist European photographers, and photographed some of the most formidable figures of the twentieth century, including Nancy Cunard and Jean Cocteau. She worked for Harper’s Bazaar (UK) and Town and Country magazines, and exhibited with Man Ray and Edward Steichen. Despite these achievements, Ker-Seymer and her work remain vastly overlooked.

Presenting research from the Tate Gallery Archive, this paper addresses her position as a queer woman artist, and connects her relative obscurity to the historic marginalisation of queer women. It contextualises Ker-Seymer’s work within a broader framework of twentieth century Modernism(s), and traces the ways Ker-Seymer used photography and scrapbooking to negotiate the complex social, cultural and political conditions of interwar Europe. More specifically, this paper highlights the importance of friendship to Ker-Seymer’s practice. Her private photograph albums depict her famous friends in both their on- and off- stage guises. Representation ranges from backstage theatrics to natural posing, and the albums unfold as sensitive meditations on the boundaries between public and private lives. Frequently, affect and emotion are associated with self-indulgence and naivety, and we are taught to be suspicious of relying too heavily on the fuzziness of feelings to interpret and understand the world around us. However, using her friends as source material, Ker- Seymer exposes the aesthetic and political potential of intimacy, and her albums prompt us to consider: How does queer intimacy inform the depiction of bodies? How might platonic intimacy be framed, or staged, within an image? In what way does the framing of intimate relationships within photography complicate the representation of identities?

Ultimately, Ker-Seymer’s works speak to the radical potential of intimate relationality, which holds the power to create a sense of solidarity and support, at the same time it produces vulnerability. Her private photographs function as vital ephemeral traces of queer friendship, desire and self- enactment.

Panel 4c | Queering the Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches

Tawnya Renelle (University of Glasgow) Hybrid forms: Opening up Space for more Queer Storytelling.

I will be investigating the way that hybrid forms provide much needed space for writers who are investigating gender and queer identities. What happens when traditional forms do not provide the space needed for writers to fully express their experiences? Hybridity becomes the answer and is a reflection of the changing components of modernism as well as the intersectional and layered experiences of queer identities. Many hybrid writers exist outside of the traditional boundaries of modernism or postmodernism in what Daniel Grassian calls "texts display[ing] active hybridity between opposites and extremes: between the highbrow and the lowbrow, between the literary and the popular, and between competing ethnicities and conflicting desires" (Hybrid Fictions 16). My paper draws attention to the ways that hybrid forms specifically work for those identifying outside of a gender binary as the form gives them the freedom and space to cross genres and gender. My work crosses the boundaries of critical and creative work and interweaves analysis of hybrid authors and the form intersected with my own experiences as a queer member of this world. By looking at the works of authors including Alison Bechdel, Maggie Nelson, CA Conrad, and others I will shine a light on the ways that hybridity is used to reflect these authors experiences with their identities. I hope in presenting my paper to raise questions about the way we teach creativity, the ways we can use form to reflect growing change and more accurately represent experiences, and to begin a discussion about the importance of hybridity within the queer community.

Emily Carrothers (Western University) The Queer, Pregnant Mother-Subject: Using Art to Heal from Queer Erasure.

This paper takes up the relationships between pregnancy, motherhood and the pursuant erasure of the queer identity. Once we have looked at the erasure of the mother-subject’s queer identity we will look at the use of art, crafting, and other forms of the affective in overcoming the lived experience of erasure. Guiding questions used for the exploration of this topic are; How does gender coherence lead to the erasure of queer identity in the pregnant mother-subject? How does the dominant paradigm of unisexuality erase the queer mother, and, how can lesbian feminist practices of crafting assist in lessening the affects of depression and anxiety specifically in queer mothers? Taking up Dana Rosenfeld’s (2009) exploration of heteronormative- homosexuality, I locate queer subject erasure at the site of gender and sexual incoherence, explaining that for both the queer and the straight communities, unisexual gender coherence allows for a solid ground from which to claim space and bodies as their own. This reality can be particularly problematic when locating the mother-subject, as motherhood appears outwardly as an inherently heterosexual identity.

The mother-subject presents as a coherently gendered heterosexual body, particularly when visibly pregnant, and we will look at ways in which the embodiment of Mother dialogues with queer identity erasure and the depression and anxiety that can be present at this intersection. Ann Cvetkovich’s work from her groundbreaking memoir Depression: A Public Feeling (2012) is particularly relevant here, and we will explore lesbian feminist practices of crafting and creating art as they apply to the lived experience of new-motherhood in a queer body that is often taken up societally as a heterosexual identity.

Panel 4c | Queering the Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches

Jessie McLaughlin (Independent) We Are Family FC.

‘i was twirlin hippin givin much quik feet’ Ntokzake Shange for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, 1974

The worlds of modernist poetics and sport are by in large dominated by white, cis, straight, male, able bodies. What, though, might they offer to bodies who may be some or even none of these?

This paper explores the ways in which a relationship between modernist poetics, sport and queerness or a practice of queering may open up safe and radical spaces where brown, black, gay, bi, asexual and/or differently abled queer and trans people can explore their bodies and their queerness. What can we learn from the possible space shared by modernist poetics and sport, what can a relationship between the two offer to body positivity, physical expression and queered critical thought and feeling, and how could this be relevant when considering the visibility and wellbeing of QTIPOC and LGBT communities?

Modernist poetry is considered by many, academia especially as inherently white, male and Western, with few exceptions to this rule. Likewise most people can name male footballers, cricketers, and tennis players before they can name their equally successful counterparts, and even in the case of the Williams sisters, there persists a dominant mental block on how their achievements are remembered and canonised .

Drawing from a wide range of queer academics, writers, artists and icons, inclusive of academic research, queer fiction and poetics, music, art and sporting history and practices this paper will take an interdisciplinary and inclusive approach, in order to reflect the breath and diversity of queer methods and practice.

In what ways might sport and art radicalise each other, how they might be able to inform new ways of working and creating? What can be learnt from the other and how can each help in discarding the many barriers and prejudices currently in place in traditional arts and sport contexts?

In addition, the paper will discuss McLaughlin’s current research, including WE ARE FAMILY FC D.I.Y, a workshop series held in August 2017 and aimed at queer practitioners interested in exploring this research, funded by Live Art Development Agency (LADA) and Norwich Arts Centre and soon to be re-imagined for Open Engagement, an annual artist-led conference (hosted this year by Queens Museum, NYC) dedicated to expanding the dialogue around and creating a site of care for the field of socially engaged art.

Day Two | April 13th

Panel 5a | Lesbian Modernism II (Including panel discussion, see programme)

Jo Winning (Birkbeck, University of London) ‘Questing for Richardson': The Terms of Lesbian Modernist Kinship in 1956.

In Carolyn Dinshaw's famous description of queer history as the 'touch across time', the time frame defined spans the many hundreds of year from the medievel period to our contemporary moment in the early 21st century. Across this vast expanse of time, Dinshaw teaches us to understand the 'affectivity' of queer historical inquiry and the engagement of our own feelings and senses as we read the 'lives, texts and other cultural phenomena' in the distant past. This paper asks what happens in a far shorter time frame, from one generation to the next, when transgenerational traces of sexual dissidence and radical literary endeavour catch the eye, mind and body of the next generation, who are able to live out lesbian identity in ways the previous generation could not. In order to argue for an affective relationship which I term 'lesbian modernist kinship', this paper explores the compelling case study of the mid-20C writer Kay Dick's attempt to 'relaunch' the forgotten modernist Dorothy Richardson in 1956, the year before Richardson dies. Amongst Kay Dick's literary effects, held in the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, is an intriguing bundle of fragments and notebooks which detail how in 1956, in a belated reading after the end of modernism, Dick encounters Richardson's Pilgrimage for the first time. Dick becomes absorbed by the queer touch she feels in the 10th novel of the series, Dawn's Left Hand, noting what she calls Richardson's 'daring' in writing the 'sleeping with love together' between the novel's main female characters. Dick, haunted by this touch and accompanied by her lover Kathleen Farrell, goes in determined search of Richardson, via publishers and family members in what she calls a 'quest for Richardson'. Dick's fervour is met with family obfuscation and publishers' indifference, yet despite these potential deadends, Dick discovers that Richardson is sequestered in a nursing home in Kent. She meets repeatedly with Richardson's sister-in-law, Rose Odle, begging access to Richardson and her manuscripts and avowing her intention to bring her and her modernism back into the critical limelight. A full 11 years before it is finally published, Dick and Farrell discover the existence of a draft of March Moonlight, the 13th unpublished novel of the Pilgrimage series. Yet, despite their efforts, the draft remains suppressed. In living proximity to Richardson and her modernism, Dick is driven by feelings of affinity and responsibility. In examining the texture of this case, this paper will argue that Dick's quest is notable both for the kinship bonds it exhibits (we might note that transgenerational lesbian modernist kinship exists in other cases too) and also for the way it prefigures our own affective investments as lesbian and queer scholars of modernism today.

Panel 5a | Lesbian Modernism II (Including panel discussion, see programme)

Kathryn Holland (MacEwan University) Queering the Family.

Families were pervasive in the making of modernism. Scholars of the period often attend to how fictional families represent aspects of cultural change and authors’ personal histories. Studies of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), for example, identify how relationships among the Ramsays and their guests enrich characterization in this novel while they reflect conditions before and after the Great War as well as Woolf’s meditations on her family’s past. Still others consider the productivity stirred in generations rather than across them by assessing the relationships among such siblings as Woolf and Vanessa Bell; Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell. Yet modernist scholarship frequently emphasizes the significance of extra- familial associations. Such research draws on evidence of writers’ resistance to their Victorian predecessors and immersion in growing public worlds, with alternative kinships forged according to intellectual and political affinities. Acknowledging that much remains to explore, this paper will address facets of one familial model, the multigenerational feminist family, in modernist culture. In it, members’ roles were neither static nor singular, and creative ideas moved in varied directions. It comprises writers involved in feminist activism, whose established forms of relationships in the family existed concurrently with their outward-looking involvement in emerging, often controversial political work across the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Within it, authors (female and male) did not develop affinities only with their contemporaries and they did not define themselves entirely against their precursors. Generations connected actively, with mutual influence in this creative hub as authors worked collaboratively and individually. They discussed, read, and responded to texts created not only at different points in time but also by different generations at work in single moments.

This paper will focus on the place of queer writers and their work within multigenerational feminist families of the early-twentieth century, drawing from two case studies: the writings of Eva Gore- Booth (1870-1926) and Christopher St John (1871- 1960). It will argue that, rather than encouraging heteronormativity and operating as insular domestic sites distant from public exchanges and institutions of modernism, feminist families were hubs of activity that fostered queer women's writing and related contributions to expansive literary communities.

Panel 5b | Psychoanalysis

Matt Mild (University of London) The Pragmatography of Inclusive Interfaith Neuromodernity Woolf’s Septimus and Kunzru’s Raj as Neuromodernist Nonbinary Memosubalterns.

In Gayatri Spivak, the notion of the subaltern includes both postcolonial identities in a broad sense and, in particular, women as objects of one husband, God, or father. This reading of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 modernist novel Mrs Dalloway and Hari Kunzru’s 2011 new modernist novel Gods Without Men as two neuronovels (Roth, 2009) focuses on the intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2005) of trauma, autism, husbandhood, and (male) childhood as an inclusive practice and performance of modernist cultural remembrance/resistance in the nonbinary/eco-philiac characters of the traumatized husband, Septimus, and the autistic child, Raj. Marco Roth notes that a new neurological interest has emerged in recent fiction, which he traces back to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. While his overview is helpful, his distinction between softer neuronovels depicting storytelling/fiction as akin to schizoid or other disorders and harder neuronovels, including McEwan’s Saturday, that ultimately uphold neuro-normative discourses seems to be in want of nuancing and further scrutiny, as undertaken in this reading. Neuroscientists (Kandel, Ramachandran, Doidge) have found evidence of the key function played by the so-called neuroplastic rewiring of memory and learning for the brain’s activity. Like Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, both Mrs Dalloway and Gods Without Men contrast (Christian) privilege with a (new) modernist understanding of interfaith and transcultural inclusion experienced in the neuroplastic (re-)ecologizing of the moment.

This reading will examine nonlinear temporality and metafictional self-reflection as experimental practices and techniques that enhance the subaltern querying/queering of male privilege embodied by Raj and Septimus. Woolf’s novel deploys neurofictional portrayals of mental health and everyday experiences in a neuro-eco- historiography of post- Great War cultural memory. Its three German, Italian, and English imperialist and chauvinistic ladies are opposed by non-normative utterances and behaviours displayed in the three interlocking post-war and postcolonial narratives of Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh, and – particularly – Septimus Warren Smith. Kunzru’s novel follows a similar narratological strategy revolving around the little Raj. The present reading zooms in chiefly on Woolf and adds some relevant insights into Kunzru, which may shed light on modernist longevity and new modernist leanings. Like the Indian-Jewish autistic child Raj in Kunzru’s present decade, Woolf’s Septimus challenges early-twentieth- century heteronormative exclusion and cultural memory by means of his nonbinary gender/sexual, ethnic, health, faith, and age intersections of subalternity.

This reading surveys the three main subtopics of nonlinear temporalities, metafictional self- reflection, and neuroplastic inclusion/inclusiveness in the modernist literary samples under discussion. Nonlinearity is explored as an enhancer of nonbinary selfhood, while self-reflection is interpreted as a cultural memory site of resistance carved out through the intersectional narratives of characters that lend themselves to be defined as memosubalterns. Finally, it is argued that neuroplasticity deserves to be further examined as a feature of literary modernism. The literary samples observed flesh out the argument that Woolf’s and other similar neurofictional works are concerned with inclusiveness/interfaith- ness and a self-aware positioning of neuromodernity, which can be described as a pragmatic and neuro-ecologic worship of the moment in a modern biosocial environment.

Panel 5b | Psychoanalysis

Dominic Dean (University of Sussex) The Lasting Queerness of the Dream of the Wolves.

Sergei Pankejeff’s dream about wolves standing on a tree, recounted during his analysis to Sigmund Freud and re-worked in Freud’s case history and later in numerous artworks rendering the scene, forms an ur-text for Modernism, psychoanalysis and sexuality. It crosses the boundaries of child and adult knowledge; of visual art, narrative and verifiable history; of the medical and the social; and of hetero- and queer sexualities. From the beginning, Freud’s analysis identified a queer dimension in the Wolf Man’s case, only to reconcile it back to a foundational encounter with heterosexuality. A notoriously failed analysis in terms of the patient’s own health, the Wolf Man case has been subject to constant re-working since its first publication, including recent attention from Whitney Davis and others to its artistic and cultural, as well as analytic, dimensions.

This paper follows the cues of recent academic attention to the Wolf Man, but also (as per Freud’s original work) returns to some foundational elements of the ‘scene’ and re-appraises their queer potential. It particularly turns towards the wolves as animals and as pack, and considers the functions of snow, distance and speed implicit in the scene to argue that this dream fulfils, as Freud suspected, a wish – but in terms queerer than his oedipal account. Simultaneously, though, this paper argues that Freud’s reading of the dream in relation to Pankejeff’s parents, its interpretation as the archetypal primal scene, need not necessarily be as reductive as it first appears, for this is a queerness that is not confined to the homosexual.

Reading this queerness in the light of more recent psychoanalysis from Serge Leclaire and Adam Phillips, and the politics of childhood with which they have engaged, the paper argues for an expansive version of the queerness in Pankejeff’s dream and its multiple renderings and analyses, not least from Pankejeff himself. It also argues that Pankejeff’s use of space, speed and animal in drawing and painting his dream engage the sexual explanation of his case with the broader landscapes of Modernism. It is this engagement that has created the enduring queerness of the dream of the wolves.

Hussein Mitha (University of Glasgow) Disruption of a Dull Malaise: History, Queer Temporality and Freud’s Late Revising of his Theory of Sexuality.

In a letter written in 1933, Freud tries to dissaude the novelist Arnold Zweig from writing a 'historical novel' about Friedrich Nietzsche. The reason Freud gives is that Nietzsche’s sexuality was totally obscure. The implication being that history and sexuality determine each other and converge in the figure of the historical novel, even that sexuality is the key and the basis for any fictional (re)imagining of history.. This would seem like a classic Freudian formulation. But did Freud forget his own advice? For around the same time, he sets out to write what he initially conceived of as a 'historical novel' of his own: on the life and the (surprising) identity of Moses (not a Jew—Freud thinks—but an Egyptian). But in the strange, peripatetic text which eventually emerged in 1938 as Moses and Monotheism, (his last major work), there is not one single reference to Moses’s sexuality. Does this surprising omission signify a renegation of the advice given to Zweig? Or does the exclusion or omission from the field of history of Moses’s sexuality provide an unsuspected basis to read the last word of a Freudian theory of sexuality? Passages from Moses and Monotheism and another text, Female Sexuality (1931) will be juxtaposed to introduce a possible relation between gender/sexuality and history in late Freud in order to sketch out some paradoxes which might lead to a possible destabilisation of masculinities as well as a possible queering of history in Freud.

Panel 5c | Modernismo

Laura Mayron (Boston University) ‘Macho Adam of Blood’: Federico García Lorca’s Ode to Walt Whitman and Transatlantic Queer Identity in 1920s New York

In 1929, Spanish gay poet Federico García Lorca traveled to New York City, encountering a new queer world flourishing in Harlem; his perception of public displays of queerness, however, was far from accepting. Lorca’s internalized homophobia and personal struggle with the performance of queer identity is immortalized in his poem “Ode to Walt Whitman”: one of the longest poems in his book Poet in New York, it is a snapshot of disgust, confusion, and longing. This poem has been widely analyzed and debated in the field of Lorca studies, though none have engaged with the way in which Lorca’s use of surrealist poetry techniques informs his perception and portrayal of queerness in the public sphere of the city. The topic of this paper addresses Lorca’s visions of queerness through the lens of surrealist poetry and the Apollonian-Dionysian model of desire. In “Ode to Walt Whitman,” Lorca uses the figure of Walt Whitman as the emblem of homoerotic male desire rooted in a bucolic past, contrasted against the urban revolt of Harlem’s maricas (queers) in the tumult of the late 1920s. Lorca’s own gay identity, transplanted from a conservative Spain that would kill him seven years later, is brought into question as he wrestles with two queer archetypes: the masculine, homoerotic, pastoral Whitman and the effeminate, cosmopolitan, and homosexual queers with their public displays of desire. Lorca’s revulsion with American capitalist society and his witnessing of the unabashed lust and “out-ness” of New York’s gay scene comes to a head in this poem, in which I analyze his use of surrealist techniques as a way to create a queer space of one’s own in the sensual tumult of this new queer scene. In conclusion, while Lorca’s queer identity remains an element of questioning and conflict in the poem, “Ode to Walt Whitman” is a powerful step in reconciling sexual identity through the lens of something a step beyond queer modernism— queer surrealism.

Daniel Everhart (Longwood University) Queer perspectives and el malinchismo in the poetry of Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia.

My project entitled “Perspectivas queer y el malinchismo en la poesía de Salvador Novo y Xavier Villaurrutia” (Queer perspectives and el malinchismo in the poetry of Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia) examines the relationship between two poets, one openly gay and the other closeted, and the politics of Mexico City during the 1920s-1940s.

After the end of the Mexican revolution, there was a rejection of various aspects of society associated with the preceding oligarchic government (El Porfiriato), including the process called the “Frenchification” of the Mexican elite. This “frenchification” (re: feminization) centered on the adaption of the French dandy model as the ideal for the bourgeoisie man. Once adapted, this altered traditional “macho” image and culminated with “El baile de los cuarenta y uno”, a party of 41 men, half of which were dressed as woman, that was police raided in 1901.

Along with the rejection of this element of the Porfiriato, there was also one of the non-Mexican. Those who aligned themselves with the foreign were deemed “malinchistas”. Novo and Villaurrutia, both being gay men, were frequently associated with the term due to their social status and nature of their literary careers. Through subverted queer perspectives and themes in their poetry, these two poets contributed to the development and use of the term “malinchista” from their opponents. Thus, the project aims to discuss these poetic elements in relation to the political nature of their epoch.

Panel 5c | Modernismo

Luiza Provedel (University of Lisbon) (Dis)placing Fernando Pessoa: A Queer, Post-Colonial Look at The Portuguese Poet’s Legacy.

Fernando Pessoa, one of the most celebrated poets in the Portuguese-speaking world, is also one of the most peculiar and displaced figures in that canon. Born in Lisbon but raised in South Africa, the Portuguese poet's literary formation was rooted in English Literature. The works of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, and Walt Whitman, amongst others, informed and transformed his writing. Throughout his entire life, though he seldom left Portugal after settling back in Lisbon in 1905, at the age of seventeen, Pessoa wrote a rich body of poetic works in English, as well as Portuguese and French.

My aim in this paper is to show how a queer, post-colonial reading of Pessoa's poetic oeuvre can not only provide a more complex and layered notion of identity in his work, but also offer a fresh interpretation of Pessoa's deconstruction of classical poetic forms, his use of 'heteronyms' and other characteristics of his poetry that place him amongst the most inventive modernist poets in the West. It is my argument that the heteronormative, nationalist construction of Pessoa's identity is not only at odds with the poet and his poetry, but also provided a limited and unwieldy tool with which to interpret Pessoa's complex and varied body of poetry. In this pursuit, I am indebted to the work of Mark Sabine, Fernando Arenas and Richard Zenith, who have pioneered the until recently inexistent queer studies of Fernando Pessoa.

The height of interest in Pessoa's studies, in Portugal, happened in late 1970 and lasted throughout the 1980's, in the aftermath of the collapse of Salazar's dictatorship, prompted by the loss of the colonial wars. So much of Portuguese identity was rooted in the sense of pride and 'grandeur' of its empire, and on a romanticized memory of the maritime expansion, perpetuated in the work of poet Luis de Camões, that loosing the African colonies precipitated a true crisis in national identity. Instrumental in rehabilitating Portuguese identity in the above mentioned decades was the work of Pessoa. If Camões was the symbol of Portugal's legacy as a 'great empire', Pessoa could offer a modern version of this identity, the idea of a modern, Portuguese man. However, fitting Pessoa into this model meant erasing undesired components of his identity, i.e. Pessoa's queerness and foreignness.

In conclusion, it is the aim of this paper to argue that recognizing Pessoa's (dis)placement in early 20th century Portuguese society offers a fresh, and more truthful, insight into his work as a queer modernist poet. I shall make the case that Pessoa's queerness intertwines with his foreign background and English influence, making his English poems into a site of otherness. Finally, because it is still necessary, the writing of this paper stems from an effort to reclaim Pessoa as a queer poet, and to celebrate him as such.

Panel 6a | The Architecture of Desire

Matilda Blackwell (University of Birmingham) Queering the Water-Cure: Fluid Sexualities in the Therapeutic Bathroom Spaces of Emily Holmes Coleman, Antonia White and Katherine Mansfield.

This paper discusses the queer body in two therapeutic bathroom spaces: the asylum bathroom and the Turkish bath. I consider how three writers subvert the traditional patriarchal associations of hydrotherapy to posit the bathroom as a space of resistance and female community.

At the turn of the century, a new focus on moral management makes the asylum bathroom a key space for patient control and punishment. Emily Holmes Coleman and Antonia White’s semi- autobiographical novels subvert this site: the bathroom becomes a place where their protagonists are able to reject normative values of femininity and, instead, embrace a sensual exhibitionism that allows an exploration of queer sexuality.

In line with this, Katherine Mansfield’s vignette of a Turkish bath focuses on female bodily experience, using this corporeality to veil suggestions of an emotional alternative to heteronormative relationships facilitated by the setting. The baths exist as a liberatory realm beyond the devouring male gaze; for Mansfield, the Turkish bath is a safe space for women and women’s bodies.

This paper posits that the bathroom, as the epitome of unstable, disruptive space, forms a site of resistance for the decentered subject (be that the queer, mad or unruly female subject), whom these writers recenter and rehome in the alternative spaces of the narrative. By opening up these alternative locations as spaces of belonging where non-normative subjects can form communities, Coleman, White and Mansfield use therapeutic bathroom spaces to destabilise heteropatriarchal relationships and thus provide new opportunities for queer expression and community.

Panel 6a | The Architecture of Desire

Colin Ripley (Ryerson University) La maison ce n’est pas une prison: Genet, Le Corbusier, Fontevrault, Savoie.

This paper presents a parallel analysis of two houses: The Villa Savoie by Le Corbusier, perhaps the most influential and most studied work of architecture of the period between the World Wars, and the most famous exemplar of Le Corbusier’s dictum the house is a machine for living in; and Fontevrault prison, La Maison Centrale, as described by Jean Genet in Miracle of the Rose (Genet 1988/1942).

There is a curious absence of houses in the novels of Jean Genet. The characters in these books inhabit cheap hotels, rooms, flophouses, even caves; they live in institutional settings - ships, reformatories, and especially prisons - but almost never houses. A far more important dwelling type in Genet's work is the prison, and the most important prison for Genet is certainly the penitentiary at Fontevrault, where the main events of Miracle of the Rose take place.

And yet, we understand that the concepts of house and its corollary family are central preoccupations in Genet’s work and life – striking in their absence (for Genet the orphan, for Genet the homosexual, for Genet the vagabond, for Genet the petty thief), but also striking in their transformation, in their erotic transubstantiation by Genet the writer. Meanwhile, Le Corbusier both denies and cements a relationship between the house and the prison in his enigmatic quote from the 1930 film about Savoie, Architecture d’aujourd’hui: ‘La maison ce n’est pas une prison’ (Chenal & Le Corbusier, 1930).

The paper focuses its analysis on the two critical architectural elements that Genet describes at Fontevrault: the stair and the disciplinary cell, and their doubles at Savoie, developing a parallel vision of two modern machines for living in. Three theoretical equivalencies are developed: prison as body; prison as desire-machine; and prison as house. The tactics of the thief (of the homosexual?) are placed face to face with the strategies of the architect (of the family?). New meanings, new understandings of the role of sexuality in the construction of architecture (and of architecture in the construction of sexuality) emerge – are stolen – in this exchange.

Panel 6a | The Architecture of Desire

Ruhul Abdin (Independent) The Queering of Spaces in Dhaka: The possibility for Modernity to help shape a new discourse?

This paper seeks to explore the emergence and death of queer spaces in the City of Dhaka, Bangladesh through a lens of experiential narratives and the role of modernity in further shaping and creating those spaces.

The paper will present findings from interviews conducted in Dhaka in 2017, and look to understand the identity of the LGBTQI community in relation to a particular socio-historical culture in Bangladesh. It will relate to the wider discourse on ideas of space for the LGBTQI community, and more importantly, identity politics and whether a space for the queer community is possible again due to the recent developments in the country? I will also critically look to both my own experiences as an urban researcher situated in Dhaka for periods of time, and my interactions with individuals and groups in spaces of safety as an artist. This paper seeks to contribute to queer studies by presenting original research in understanding space physical and online, contemporary activities in the LGBTQI spaces of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Through interviews with creative practitioners - writers and artists that are involved in activism, and art-making.

The urban discourse is often aligned closely with ideas of Lefebvres’ Production of Space, and a call for a ‘Right to the City’. Taking his triad perceived, conceived and lived - queer space in Dhaka is not a new social phenomena. However, very limited Queer art or literature has been produced and leaves a gap in research for queer studies. The post- colonial discourse of the urban often seems much more aligned to disentangle the identity of the city from its colonial past, but also posit itself into its own future that seems more aligned to the neo-liberal model and its inability to celebrate difference, forsaking with it, its inherent cultural heritage and potential to become a place for all.

In Bangladesh, The Section 377 (1860) still exists - recent incidents have put back developments to the potential abolishment of this archaic British colonial law. Although Modernity in Europe and elsewhere saw a rise to eradicate such laws, Modernity’s influence in South Asia, especially in Bangladesh remains limited with regards to Queer studies. The murder of Xulhaz Mannan in his home in Dhaka in front of his mum in 2016 - Xulhaz was a leader in LGBTQI rights, and a co-founder of the magazine Roopban in Dhaka and was involved in the the first Pride event in the city (2014), and the arrest of a group of young men holding a party in the outskirts of the city in a Community Centre’ which was raided by police and Rapid Action Batallion are the beginnings of a cultural shift in the way LGBQTI community is being treated. This paper sees both the State apparatus and religious fundamentalists as stumbling blocks to realising the right to the city for the LGBTQI community in Dhaka. Post Xulhaz’s murder, the first safe space, a gay cafe, Cafe M in Dhanmondi, was closed down. It leaves the LGBTQI community to themselves to develop tactics at their own risk, and to challenge a State, which has in recent times been responsible for many disappearances of political dissidents.

Panel 6b | Heavenly Bodies: Spiritualties and Religion

Wenjie Li (Independent) Xing Hun: An Ephemeral Performance of Marriage.

As recognized by law in China, traditional monogamous marriage represents the commitment of love and the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex in a contractual relationship. However, in the last decade, an emerging unique group has appeared – a group of couples who end their marital relationship immediately following the formal wedding ceremony in order to live separately with their own lovers. This marriage practice is called ‘Xing Hun’ in China. It is by no means a marital separation in a common sense, but a modality of a pretend, or fake, marriage largely practiced between a gay man and a lesbian woman in order to protect themselves from being attacked in a heterosexual society, as well as to alleviate the pressure from their family, colleagues and friends urging them to get married upon reaching the legally marriageable age.

In my paper I will discuss Xing Hun as a recent phenomenon providing space and an opportunity for the exploration of utopian potentialities of queerness, as a practice of ‘disidentification’, a way of problematizing the social gender norms that already exist. I propose that Xing Hun, as an ephemeral wedding ceremony act, subverts the concept of heterosexual marriage by turning the marriage ceremony into a legitimate queer performance in public, a lively ironic ‘cabaret’ show in front of the established ‘marriage institution’. Thus the Xing Hun ceremony itself becomes a significant performative statement of self-identification in response to the ideological cultural logistics of heteronormativity in China, through which marginal subjects retrieve their own sense of identity. I refer to this identity as ‘the identity-in- difference’, one that does not reduce subjectivity either to the imposed socially constructed model or to what has been referred to as an essentialist understanding of the self.

Panel 6b | Heavenly Bodies: Spiritualties and Religion

Elizabeth Blake (Haverford College) Gale Wilhelm and the Queering of the Marriage Plot.

Despite effusive blurbs from Carl Sandburg and relative commercial success, Gale Wilhelm’s late work has almost entirely escaped scholarly attention. Indeed, when Wilhelm is read, it is most often for her two explicitly lesbian novels, We Too Are Drifting (1934) and Torchlight to Valhalla (1938). This paper shifts that focus to her so-called “heterosexual” novels in order to demonstrate their resistance to, and queering of, the conventional marriage plot.

Where her lesbian novels interrupt or replace the straight marriage plot, her later novels resist from within the genre, rewriting romantic marriage as a union in tension with the traditional family. In her final novel, Never Let Me Go (1945), Wilhelm’s protagonist struggles with the knowledge that she is betraying her mother by falling in love with a partner of the wrong gender: a man. In addition to illuminating queer experience by rewriting this familiar queer tale as a heterosexual love plot, Wilhelm also makes a feminist point: the matriarch’s misandry emerges from her own ill-treatment on the marriage market. Her feminism is equally palpable in Bring Home the Bride (1940), a novel whose heroine is unabashedly independent, and more sexually aggressive and experienced than her husband. In its depiction of their hopes for marriage—an ideal in which contraception plays a central role—and in the dissolution of those hopes, the novel ironically suggests that companionate marriage might in fact disrupt the nuclear family and reproductive futurity, even as the imperative of reproduction might imperil an individual marriage.

Taken together, these novels comprise a formal resistance to the conventional marriage plot that is meaningfully queer and distinctly feminist. More broadly, this paper begins the work of reclaiming Wilhelm for modernism, demonstrating the aesthetic experimentation that undergirds her critique of the marriage plot, and articulating the queer structure of her “heterosexual” novels.

Panel 6b | Heavenly Bodies: Spiritualties and Religion

Maryanne Saunders (King’s College London) ‘Darling, I love your dress, but your purse is on fire!’: Queer Performance and Christian Imagery.

These famous words, purportedly uttered by the infamous queer Hollywood starlet Tallulah Bankhead to an Anglican acolyte swinging incense down the church aisle, do more than elicit a brief chuckle. Instead the direct comparison made between liturgical props and feminine costume allows us to imagine that the similarities run much deeper than simple aesthetics. This paper addresses the notions of performativity, embodiment and religious iconography as they are found outside of sacred space - in LGBT venues and culture.

I will explore the adaptation of Christian regalia and symbolism in protest movements such as the international network ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’ (SPI), drag acts like London’s Virgin Xtravaganza and the contemporary photography of Elisabeth Ohlson-Wallin (b.1961). I will survey these specific examples and demonstrate how they are emblematic of the wider identification queer artists and performers have formed with the theatrical nature of organised worship, its traditions and the holy motifs used. I will begin by defining what I mean by performativity and embodiment in a religious context, drawing on the writings of Gerard Loughlin, Ashon Crawley and Jeffrey McCune amongst others. Following this, through visual and theological analysis of my primary examples I will examine how the focus on the body; its actions and movements in an ecclesiastical context have been subverted and challenged by queer performers.

These examples critically examine the place of the queer body within and in opposition to Western Christian worship. For example, the SPI developed in the late 1970s as a response to fervent anti-gay church protesters in the gay district of San Francisco, initially dressing as Benedictine nuns to inflame and offend their harassers. The ecclesiastical imagery soon became a vital part of their mission to protest bigotry and injustice whilst raising money for local charities, AIDs education and political campaigns.

Of course, the camp and satirical undertones of the movement are evident also, as they are in Virgin Xtravanganza’s performance persona: a bearded Madonna from the deep south. The Virgin’s costumes and songs are provocative and delightful for her audience. Conversely, Ohlson-Wallin’s photographic series Ecce Homo (1998) is decidedly more haunting as she inserts disenfranchised queer troupes; gimps, rent boys and transgender folks in to her retelling of biblical stories. The re- enactment of familiar scenes and the embodiment of a key figure in Christianity both provide an uncanny reflection of church teachings for the audience whilst carving an undeniable space for the queer body and its stories in these liturgical narratives. I will end the paper by reflecting on the need for a broader focus in this field of study - one that moves away from the exclusive narrative of gay white men and embraces belief outside of Christianity, people of colour and non-binary people’s creative engagement with religion and sexuality. By the end of this paper I will have demonstrated why the use of religious iconography in queer performance and art is important beyond its parodic connotations and why it continues to critique, challenge and involve audiences in this historical conversation.

Panel 6c | Camp!

Daisy Ferris (Nottingham Trent) Lesbian Camp and the Decadent Tradition in Modernist Periodical Culture.

Described by Ezra Pound as ‘soft and muzzy’, the camp aesthetics of the decadent movement are often seen as an anathema to modernism’s masculinist ideology. This paper, however, will trace the development of lesbian camp within modernism, demonstrating how figures of the decadent movement such as Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde later came to be adopted by queer female modernists of the 1910s and 1920s. In particular, it will address the periodical communities which facilitated this, and the legacy they themselves owe to publications like the infamous Yellow Book, along with American “Freak Periodicals” and “ephemeral bibleots” of the 1890s.

The use of drag and camp humour is often conceptualised as being a unique facet of the gay male community, and the idea of lesbian camp is the source of some contention among critics. This paper will contest the notion that camp is the sole remit of men, making the case for a subculture of lesbian camp existent within female modernist communities, albeit one which differs in various ways from traditional definitions of camp. This paper will reveal how female modernists adapted the camp aesthetics of the decadent movement for their own usage, resisting the apolitical mantra of ‘art for art’s sake’, and instead appropriating the camp for political ends. It will discuss the magazine contributions of three significant queer modernist women: Little Review editor Margaret Anderson; modernist author Djuna Barnes, and artist and poet Florine Stettheimer, to reveal the significance of camp as a political tool which facilitated, amongst other things, these women’s radical feminist politics.

Part of a broader project to assert the role of humour and the queer aesthetics at play within modernist women’s literature, this paper will offer an insight into the role of lesbian camp within modernist periodical communities, and will endeavour to show the ways in which modernism is indebted to figures like Wilde and Beardsley, whose legacy of sexual libertinism and outsider status found a place within the radical sexual politics of early twentieth century avant-garde feminism.

Panel 6c | Camp!

Ashley Savard (Durham University) Dublin in Drag: Joyce’s Nighttown.

When James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom appears in the ‘Circe’ episode of Ulysses as a ‘charming soubrette’ and urgently tells the dominatrix Bella/o that he ‘tried [Molly’s] things on only twice, a small prank, in Holles street’, he does so with characteristic ambiguity (U 15.2986-91). Is Bloom offering Bella/o potentially incriminating evidence of his cross-dressing? Yes, but his flirtatious performance of the ‘charming soubrette’ gives him away as he demonstrates to Bello that this is not his first time taking on women’s clothing and, further, it is not his first time “playing” a woman.

While Joyce’s nighttown episode has been examined for its extensive ties to theater, minstrel shows, pantomime, and Vaudeville, I would like to assert the usefulness of recognizing its shared characteristics with late nineteenth and early twentieth-century drag balls. I do not wish to argue that “Circe” is a drag ball or that it should be exclusively understood as a drag ball, but to draw attention to the shared opportunities of these settings as places of performative freedom. By suggesting that all individuals have the ability and opportunity to perform a duality, if not plurality, of identities, drag highlights the impossibility of absolute categorization or of defining and reading exactly “what” and individual (or character) “is”.

Subject to increasing legislation and raids, drag performers continued to exist and to form part of the cultural imagination surrounding such events as the famous Harlem drag balls and the “mollie” clubs of London. This paper will propose the historical potentiality of Joyce’s knowledge of the drag ball and argue that the setting of “Circe” reflects the safety, anonymity, and performative freedom that is cherished by those within the drag community, suggesting a non-humanistic reading in which identities are an amalgamation of an individual’s performative role(s). Characters from earlier episodes reappear in apparently humorous and absurd guises, making us question their very reality. However, what “Circe” lays plain is that it is our perception of reality that must be further questioned.

The comparatively liberating effect of the “underground” in ‘Circe’ suggests that these fantasies might be just as real as the performances the reader previously accepted as “natural”. What emerges is something entirely different from the psychoanalytic readings of ‘Circe’ – one that is non- humanistic, insists on a kind of flatness of character, and celebrates drag for its performative possibilities rather than its potential to overturn categories that are inherently inadequate as cultural descriptors.

Through the use of drag as a model of self-conscious performance, this paper argues that Joyce’s ‘Circe’ provides a radical expansion of the number of cultural roles assumed to be available in turn- of- the- century Dublin, something akin to the nineteenth and twentieth-century drag ball. In entering nighttown, the reader enters a space that is performatively “open”. Mundane everyday performances are shown to be no more real than those of the drag performers we encounter on the streets of Dublin’s red light district.

Panel 6c | Camp!

Claire Drewery (University of Sheffield) ‘The Strange Longing for the Artificial’: ‘Unmasking’ Performativity, Victorian Corsetry and Wildean Dandyism in Katherine Mansfield’s Dramatic Short Fiction.

In a notebook entry dated eight years after the death of Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield outlined her intention of writing a sketch or short story in which a dual existence enabled the protagonist to discover ‘the truth of all’. The sketch, she anticipated, would be filled ‘with climatic disturbance, & also of the strange longing for the artificial’. As a statement of artistic intention, Mansfield’s pronouncement that ‘the truth of all’ equates with both a dual existence and artificiality is illuminating in an era which saw traditional, humanist notions of identity come under increasing challenge from contemporary intellectual, scientific and popular discourses. Conceivably, the ‘climactic disturbance’ to which she refers in this 1908 notebook entry anticipates her own engagement with the epochal shift in beliefs about human subjectivity occurring from around the late nineteenth century and intensifying in the wake of Wilde’s two notorious trials of 1895. It is thus not coincidental that the pages of the notebook immediately preceding Mansfield’s professed longing for artificiality contain numerous references to Wilde, consisting most frequently of transcriptions from The Picture of Dorian Gray and, most notably, the declaration that ‘[b]eing natural is simply a pose and the most irritating pose I know’ (99).

In this paper, I examine Mansfield’s focus upon unmasking artificiality through the interrelated tropes of fashion and performativity. This aesthetic device owes much to the influence of Wilde, as well as anticipating Judith Butler’s later notion that successful performativity requires ‘the repetition or citation of a prior, authoritative set of practices’. For Mansfield, such authoritative practices – most notably those invested in the theatrical and sartorial fashions of her day – are distinctive features of the short stories most indebted to her use of the dramatic form. They are particularly noteworthy features of her 1915 sketch ‘Stay- Laces’: a satire written in dialogue and juxtaposing a frivolous concern with shopping, fashion and corsetry against the backdrop of the brutality of World War I. Similarly, Mansfield’s two 1918 stories, ‘Bliss’ and ‘Je Ne Parle pas Français’ both draw upon theatrical conventions to reveal how exaggerated artificiality and unconscious performances of socially-accepted norms are key themes associated with Wildean dandyism.

The contemporary fashions of dandyism and Victorian corsetry have a particularly symbolic resonance with the transition from late Victorian to modernist conceptualisations of the formulation and regulation of sexuality. An exploration of their representation in Mansfield’s stories illustrates how identities perceived as natural are exposed as illusory, amounting to the repetition of prior acts which are then re-enacted and disseminated through literature and the popular media. Through this analysis, I show how Mansfield’s own concern with the perpetuation of both normative and taboo identities remains as much a preoccupation in her writing as the notion of human subjectivity as a series of ‘acts’.

Panel 7a | Civil Rights

Christy Wensley (University College London) Unmastered: Queer desire in Henry James and James Baldwin and the Erotics of Trauma from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement.

In an interview in The Henry James Review, Baldwin addresses the influence that James has had on his career, on his own point of view as a transatlantic writer observing, critiquing, and, yes, loving, America as an outsider looking in. He eloquently traces the web of race, freedom, innocence, enslavement, dominance, and point of view of the ‘American scene’ –identifying James as ‘literally, for me, the only American writer’ who confronts what Baldwin names the ‘American Dilemma.’

These figures, on the peripheries of modernism, influencing and influenced by its rhythms, its concerns with identities, and points of view, are in many ways circumscribed by America’s defining trauma, resisting its forces of dehumanization and cruelty. As Baldwin makes explicit in one of his many references to and revisions of James’s work and phrasing, they are both responding to ‘a failure to see, a failure to live, a failure to be’ as the American. This ‘inability to perceive the realities of others’ that Baldwin sees James’s novels addressing, rages through the 20 th century, and my paper will explore how each author’s works respond to this failure of compassion for and recognition of others through queer desire.

My paper will focus on Henry James’s Roderick Hudson and The Bostonians as his most direct novelistic responses to the Civil War, and as two of his more explicitly homoerotic texts, in which desire is formulated as a critical though troubled resistance to forms of aesthetic, emotional, and political (patriarchal) mastery. I will also address James’s Prefaces as foundational texts for modernist literature and literary theory extending through the mid-century, and the often problematic recurring images of slavery, darkness, and blackness, as well as innuendo, in relation to an ever-shifting imbalance of power he proposes between himself, his reader, and his work. Moving from James to James Baldwin, I will continue to explore the later author’s references to ‘the Master’, as he re-invests the term with simultaneously affectionate, creative, challenging, and erotic significance, and read his novels, in part, as a conversation with James. I’m hoping to identify the ways in which both have responded to the trauma of the Civil War and the continued fight for Civil Rights through pushing the ‘accepted’ boundaries of what physical forms, as in black, or queer, or female bodies, as well as what literary form, can accomplish.

Panel 7a | Civil Rights

Teona Micevska (University of Giessen) Queering First Wave Feminism: The Suffragettes and Edith Sitwell.

By the time the Representation of the People Act 1918 and the Representation of the People Act 1928 were passed, Edith Sitwell was well established in the literary scene of London. Yet while the women and men in the suffrage movement used various means to promote their cause, including protests, debates, and violence, being exposed to physical suffering, imprisonment, and force- feeding, Sitwell did not participate, nor did she in the anti-feminist discourse. However, through her poetry and essays on the poetic tradition she clearly positioned herself in the ongoing negotiations on the roles of women in literary modernism. This paper explores the interrelation between the political and legal struggle for women’s suffrage and the endeavours within the scene of literary modernism for advancement of the position of women authors and their works, and the implications of this interrelation on the canonisation of the feminism.

By juxtaposing the activities of the movement for women’s suffrage in the years between the two acts and the publication of Sitwell’s most experimental collection of poetry Façade in 1922, this paper proposes that the movement and Sitwell exemplify two different kinds of feminism which were simultaneously developing. This in turn questions the solidified idea about the first wave of feminism as composed only of one kind of political struggle, without suggesting that its significance should be in any way diminished or made comparable. Instead, this paper offers exemplary cases which pluralize the understanding of first wave feminism, to include diversity of practices, means, media, and arts by and through which the position of women was reimagined.

This paper further proposes that the pluralization of the first wave goes hand in hand with its queering, thus questioning the narrative of progression in the development of feminism which regards the third wave as queer. Despite their vastly different means, both the suffragettes and Sitwell consciously investigated what constituted the idea of a woman in their day and age, what possibilities women had, and could have to express their femininity, and what mechanisms were, and could be at play in the shaping and recognition of women’s identities. In doing so, they repeatedly raised concerns which decades later, but in relation to the third wave and onwards, came to be recognized as intersectional.

To exemplify this, two aspects of the suffrage movement are analysed: the fractions within the movement about the ways in which citizenship defines what being a woman meant, and the use of fashion columns to promote and shape not only the cause, but also a specific idea of femininity. In Sitwell’s case, this paper offers close readings selected poems from Façade, and of selected essays on poetry, to demonstrate how Sitwell re-imagined the judgements attached to poetry written by women, the assigned place of women in literature, and to explore her vision of an emancipatory performance of femininity. It is this increased and articulated awareness of the performance of femininity, and of the dependence on roles of the identity of a woman that renders the feminisms practiced by both the suffragettes and Sitwell as intrinsically queer, the one in their fight for women’s suffrage, the other in her endeavour to secure herself and subsequent generations of women authors a place in the canon of modernist poetry.

Panel 7a | Civil Rights

Jessica Cotton (University College London) Modernism’s Queer Little Child: Olive Schreiner and Feminism’s Fragmentary Origins

In her early posthumously published work, Undine (1876) Olive Schreiner offers a portrait of a recalcitrant child subject who reads up secretly on the history of the will and who refuses what she defines in Women and Labour (1911) as the ‘parasitism’ of the relations between the sexes. In her proximity to the nonhuman, the precocious wily child petrifies adult subjects – turning them metaphorically into stone – revealing the importance of will for the ‘queer child’ and the fragmentation of allegories of development for Schreiner’s incipient radicalism. Reading Undine alongside the child figures in The Story of an African Farm (1883), one of whom registers a ticking clock as indicative of history as violence, I consider the importance of these queer child subjects (as the best readers of the text, as subjects who stand outside history and who are thus most attuned to the importance of imagining different social relations) for Schreiner’s feminist concerns, illuminating the intersection of gender, race and sexuality in her work.

Through a reading of the wilfulness of this queer modernist child, and the importance of queer affect in negotiating feminist positions in Schreiner’s work (as they are also in Rebecca West’s The Sentinel), I make an argument for the vital intersection of queer and feminist modernisms in the context of the anti-bildungsroman. The child has become a crucial figure in queer theory of late but the queer child, I contend, also has much to say about feminism’s fragmentary origins (‘Life is a Series of Abortions’ was one of Schreiner’s discarded titles) – of the importance of a fragmented beginning to universal suffrage. More particularly, I explore the intersection between the child’s and women’s rights in the context of Schreiner’s ideas on sexuality and the role of the sexes, developed in correspondence with Havelock Ellis. The elusive child subject is invariably the prelude to Schreiner’s writings because it reveals an alterity in the subject that unsettles developmental narratives and suggests other possible forms of becoming (even if they are curtailed by marriage, childbirth and economic necessity in her proto-modernist novels).

Panel 7b | The Queer Science: Sexology

Christine Emmett (University of Warwick) Sexology at the Frontier: Racism and Desire in Peripheral Modernism.

This paper traces the transition from early sexology towards Freud’s first theses on infantile sexuality as figured through the work of Sarah Gertrude Millin, arguably the most significant writer of the 20 th century miscegenation novel within the Anglophone world.

Though largely obscure today, Sarah Gertrude Millin (1903-1968) holds the distinction of being the most prolific South African writer of her time, having also enjoyed international publication and prestige. Coming to fame through narratives detailing the ostensible tragedy of racial mixing, Millin’s work is not only a measure of literary experimentation from the periphery of empire, but also an indication of a wider sphere of racist discourse and production that linked the centre to the periphery in modernist literature.

Millin achieved international critical acclaim with her novel God’s Stepchildren (1924). As form and content, her narrative mode and its pathologizing of sexuality and race, circulated widely across the anglophone centre/periphery, leading to the humorous observation that the miscegenation novel was “now as regular a South African export as gold or fruit.”

Given Millin’s popularity overseas, as well as her adopted role as “interpreter of South Africa to the English speaking world”, this paper will focus on strikingly modern character of her work and how it drew on early sexology to depict a particularly modernist conception of scientific racism. In this way, I consider the textual influence of Krafft-Ebing’s studies on homosexuality in Psychopathia Sexualis (1886, translated into English from 1893) and how Freud’s discoveries around childhood sexuality highlight the contradictions of Krafft-Ebing’s work, as well as Millin’s proto-scientific racism.

The value of examining Millin’s work on the miscegenation novel is in seeing how race and desire were constructed through early sexology – and how race, in turn, determined depictions of heteronormative relationships. This examination additionally highlights the theoretical breakthrough that was Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), with particular emphasis on 1905 edition, showing how Freud’s early work in sexuality extended and undermined early sexology. Through teasing out its contradictions, this approach helps us re-evaluate the frontier as figured in Millin’s work, providing a reassessment of heteronormativity and racism in (peripheral) modernist narrative.

Panel 7b | The Queer Science: Sexology

Cristina Díaz (University of Oviedo) Why Do We Need to be Somebody´s darling? The Dynamics of Language and Sex in Contested Modernist Texts.

Sexology and marriage manuals were on the rise during the interwar years shaping intimacy and sexuality and creating the limits of what was morally acceptable in sexual relationships, but also in romantic ones. Heterosexual relationships were codified as the normal and other forms were pathologized and underrepresented in language, especially those practised by women. Deborah Cohler speaks of “limited vocabulary for articulating female homosexuality” (2007, 81) and Lillian Faderman (1985) studies how romantic relationships between women were generally regarded as romantic friendships. However, authors such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rosamond Lehmann and Radclyffe Hall employ different strategies to undermine the supremacy of a language that diverts queer relationships.

The bondage of language to express lesbian desire is represented in the novels that this article analyse where women engage in different romantic and sexual relationships. Friends is the word that categorizes the lesbian relationships that they explore because the society that frames the texts does not accept lesbian lovers. Language produces categories but society produces language. Britain between the wars was homophobic, so no specific word was employed to address these relationships. Hall, Lehmann and Warner do not speak about lesbian relationships in the same way that they could do with heterosexual ones because language does not allow it. However, they make visible lesbianism through the vagueness and ambiguity of language as I examine. Metaphors, similes and even biblical language are employed to describe the intimacy and lesbian sex of the protagonists and at the same time untangling and contesting traditional ideas of female identity. Besides, Warner, Lehmann and Hall employ open-endings in their narratives to address the fluidity of women´s desires and identities.

Panel 7b | The Queer Science: Sexology

Teresa Sanders (University of Exeter) The Politics of Desire: Lesbian Subjectivity and Cross-Class Relationships in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Summer Will Show (1936)

As has been discussed by numerous critics, a discourse of lesbianism began to emerge in the late nineteenth century with the advent of sexology and its exhaustive system of taxonomic labelling of multiple sexual identities and behaviours. The lesbian — medicalised, pathologised, and, according to theories of female inversion, and defined as a male soul or psyche trapped in a female’s body — was subjected to increasing scrutiny well into the twentieth century, associated with abnormality, degeneracy, and perversion. By the late 1920s in particular (and especially after the banning for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928), the lesbian became a catalyst of moral panic, tapping into Britain’s larger fears of national decay and degeneration.

In light of this context, the various critics who have considered the British author Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1936 novel, Summer Will Show, have explored the extent to which she responds to and refutes such negative perceptions of female sexual identity. More specifically, although the novel’s ostensible setting is the French Revolution of 1848, it constitutes a polemical allegory of the political injustices of the 1930s, and exemplifies the centrality of Warner’s Communist politics in her fiction of this era. What critics have failed to identify, however, and what this paper therefore seeks to rectify, is the significance of Warner’s portrayal in this novel of the lesbian cross-class relationship between the upper-class protagonist, Sophia Willoughby, and the lower-class bohemian Minna Lemuel. Of crucial importance here is the formation and portrayal of a variety of female bonds. As this paper will argue, it is the development of a specifically lesbian cross-class bond and corresponding political lesbian subjectivity that fundamentally enables Warner to conceptualise the lesbian as an agent of historical change, and as one that could potentially facilitate successful revolution in the future. This firstly enables Warner to reclaim and rewrite women’s silence and absence from historical narratives, in accordance with the politics of the historical novel. It also crucially reimagines and (re)narrativises the vindicated figure of the lesbian who has been doubly marginalised from history as both a woman and sexual aberration as a key figure and embodiment of both resistance and revolutionary change.

Panel 7c | Boundless Desire: Navigating Borders

Barbara Gallego Larrarte (University of Oxford) Homosocial Friendships and E. M. Forster’s Public Turn.

From the early 1930s, E. M. Forster’s intimate circle of friends was made up in great part of gay men younger than himself. His closest friends included writer and editor J. R. Ackerley, poet and novelist William Plomer, sociologist W. J. H. (Sebastian) Sprott, novelist Christopher Isherwood and policeman Bob Buckingham, all around 20 years his junior. By 1932, these relationships were firmly established, constituting Forster’s main social circle, one characterised by its youth and homosociality. At a time when homosexuality was illegal and censorship on the grounds of obscenity a real possibility, these friendships fashioned spaces where sexual identity did not have to be concealed. On the contrary, it was the foundation of interpersonal closeness and of a larger sense of group feeling. This homosocial circle gave Forster an inclusive environment which offered him a sense of purpose at a time when he was feeling outdated and obsolete. During 1934 there was a distinct shift in Forster’s public engagement. Through the various platforms available to him, he gradually and increasingly commented on contemporary social and political issues. This paper argues that these two developments were interconnected. By engaging with his new friends’ experiences and points of view, Forster was encouraged to define his own public stance in relation to the challenges of the 1930s, giving him the confidence and sense of relevance to take on the role of public intellectual in defence of his version of liberal humanism for which he is still known today.

I build this argument by focusing on the relationship between Forster and Isherwood, which spanned from their first meeting in 1932 until Forster’s death in 1970. We have a uniquely substantial epistolary record of their friendship because from 1929 onwards Isherwood was rarely in England for long. Their correspondence was particularly prolific in the second half of the 1930s and in early 1940s, documenting each writer’s responses to the changing world and the upcoming war. I argue that the nature of this particular friendship had an impact on Forster at a time when he was trying to work out what his public voice ought to be in the build-up to the Second World War, giving shape to his ideas about the individual and the community, about personal loyalties and about the role of belief in the late 1930s. I contend that his friendship with Isherwood, one grounded on their homosexual identities, is part of the backdrop to Forster’s key ideological legacy: his essay ‘Two Cheers for Democracy’, later titled ‘What I Believe’.

Panel 7c | Boundless Desire: Navigating Borders

Serdar Küçük (Istanbul Gelişim University) The Impact of Modernism on Ottoman Literature and a Brief Discussion of Bahâ Tevfik’s alas, love! and love, selfishness

The nineteenth century has been one of the most tumultuous transition periods in Ottoman history. During a series of reforms to modernize the political structure of the empire, which first started in 1839 and continued with interruptions and backlashes until the foundation of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923, drastic changes occurred in social and cultural life. In parallel with the growing nationalisms in Europe at the time, the westernization and secularization attempts in the war-torn and collapsing empire were mixed with a wish to construct a proud new Turkish identity. A similar transformation was at work in the literary milieu. While the modern genres of novels, novellas, short stories, plays and free verse were pouring in from the west in the late nineteenth century, an emerging group of intellectuals including Namık Kemal, Mithat Efendi and Tevfik Fikret, who were among the first to use these mediums, were making a call for a more national literature whose primary purpose had to be teaching morality and educating the illiterate masses. Their agenda included the rejection and disparaging of a centuries-old queer literature, which they saw as crude, amoral and incapable of representing a true untainted Turkish identity. Thus a rich queer literary and cultural heritage fell out of favor with the modernist literature. The range of the literary forms that were downplayed and censored during the Reformation era was wide and varied: scientific or social catechisms (İlmihals), which discussed pederasty as a natural component of daily life, lengthy and meticulously composed metrical poems (Mesnevîs), which often employed male-male desire as an allegory of the path that leads to the divine creator, odes written for young male hamam (Turkish bath) workers and the most beautiful boys in the city (Dellaknâmes and Şehrengizes) and the memoires of promiscuous chasers who came from various sides of the social stratum (sailors, craftsmen, merchants, police and military officers, high-ranking religious clergy, bureaucrats, sultans, etc.). In addition to these textual forms, bawdy and often queer theatrical performances such as Karagöz puppet shows and Orta Oyunu farces, whose audience was made up of people from all classes, religions, ages and sexes, used to take place in street corners, alleys and shabby backyards. All these genres were now being replaced with new forms of prose and poetry that depicted a uniform love and eroticism — decent and monogamous, and at the same time unfulfilled, lonely and desperately heteronormative. Homosexuality gradually came to be regarded as a practice of the degenerate Ottoman elite and the Istanbul bourgeoisie. The boylovers of the old literature were now being transformed in modern novel into the “dandy” — the rich, effeminate, overly westernized and perplexed young man who was caught in the sway of sensual and material desires that he could not control. Amid this turbulent transformation Bahâ Tevfik, a progressive Ottoman intellectual who is also known as the first person in the country to have discussed issues such as feminisms, socialisms and anarchisms in his writings, has stood out from the crowd with his fiction. Tevfik’s treatment of gay love in his two realist short stories “Alas, Love!” ([Ah Bu Sevdâ!..], 1910) and “Love, Selfishness” ([Aşk, Hodbinî], 1910) 2 significantly differs from his contemporaries’ approach. Instead of debasing queer desire as an upper class deviation, he has drawn character portrayals that challenge the ongoing repudiation. In a way, Tevfik’s fiction asserts that queerness has continued to exist as an ordinary and natural part of the Ottoman life styles…

Panel 7c | Boundless Desire: Navigating Borders

Sarah Schwartz (The Graduate Center, CUNY) ‘The skeleton beneath’: Queer Critique of Liberal Nationalism in The Voyage Out.

Whether rejecting decadence and realism in the drive to “make it new” or provoking the wrath of censors with extramarital or non-normative sexuality, British literary modernism has broadly been understood as a negotiation with the Victorian ideals which precede it. In the last few decades, scholars have begun to also consider the ways this literature evinces or absents the crown of Victorian accomplishment—empire. In either case, as both the prevailing world system and the defining characteristic of “Britishness,” the asymmetry of colonialism necessarily informs the work and thought of modernist writers.

In this paper, I take up Lisa Lowe’s call to read for entanglements of liberalism, colonialism, and capitalism to complicate extant readings of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. Since the interventions of Kathy Philips and Jane Marcus, scholars have invested in Woolf’s writings as part of their historical moments and thus as political texts. However, much scholarship has emphasized Woolf’s forward thinking in terms of gender and sexuality in contradistinction to her troubled relationship to racial others. While this paper does not attempt to recuperate Woolf’s exoticism in The Voyage Out, the paper picks up on Anna Snaith’s recent discovery of copious notes which demonstrate the depth of Woolf’s understanding of the economic and political systems that maintained Britain’s empire.

On the basis of this discovery, this paper reads the novel as an informed and specifically queer critique of the liberal nationalism which undergirds the imperial project. The paper traces the entwined journeys of the inexperienced Rachel Vinrace and the highly symbolic yet academically neglected ship, the Euphrosyne. Specifically, this paper reads the vessel and its indefinitely articulated cargo as symbolic of the invisible work of women and colonial products respectively. The Euphrosyne, I argue, then theorizes the political economy that undergirds Rachel’s journey in the novel and enacts the invisibility of the colonial products that maintain the British economy. Using Jessica Berman’s generative theorization of the trans- in “transnational,” this paper then examines Rachel’s relative levels of freedom at sea and ashore through the consideration of liberal education. In teasing out the relations of Rachel and the Euphrosyne, this paper then opens a space for reading Rachel’s illness as a failure in which a kind of queer potentiality escapes. In figuring her journey thus, this paper points to two openings for scholarship: first, the consideration of failed women subjects in modernist literature as sites of queer critique and second, Woolf’s early theorization of the imbrication of liberal nationalism, sexuality, and the colonial project. Woolf’s deployment of her political analysis in these coded symbols reminds us that negotiating queer identity also always involves navigating a national imperative toward legibility.

Panel 8a | Quare Modernism: Irish Sexualities

Peter Kao (Graduate Institute of Strategic and International Affairs & Graduate Institute of Law, National Chung Cheng University) Self‐and‐ Other Relationship in Farewell My Concubine and Waiting for Godot.

This study mainly focuses on individual self‐identity embodied respectively in 1920s Ireland, and 1960s China as intersected. Unlike the mainstream critical receptions towards Farewell My Concubine and Waiting for Godot as the production of "queer performance" and the depiction of "the ordinary man struggling for the meaning of life and individual existence" respectively as their major thematic concerns, this research paper reverses the vicissitude approach in the former studies and mainly scrutinizes how spilt and traumatized self is presented respectively in Farewell and Waiting as the political representation of the contemporary China and Ireland in the twentieth century. The spilt and traumatized self is proposed as a unit like an organic whole. The author argues that the spilt and traumatized self that Cheng Dieyi (Farewell), Estragon, and Vladimir (Waiting) fulfilled is not only haunted by self‐decision of sexuality in Farewell and by poverty‐stricken reality in Waiting, but also can be seen as the contemporary collective struggle left into memory to be magnified as or cross‐ referenced with the whole epoch suffering from the haunting effects led to by Irish and Chinese nationalism in the twentieth century China and Ireland. The Irish Civil War and the Chinese Cultural Revolution shaped and reflected the conventional boundary that was deemed broken through and transgressed. Moreover, postnationalist approach is adopted to examine the twentieth epoch.

Panel 8a | Quare Modernism: Irish Sexualities

Naoise Murphy (University of Cambridge) ‘Nothing seemed to be natural’: Queerness and transnational identities in the novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O’Brien.

Elizabeth Bowen and Kate O’Brien, two of the most significant Irish writers of the twentieth century, are rarely studied comparatively. Yet there are some crucial overlaps in their literary concerns, concerns which highlight an important current of subversive dissent running through modern, postcolonial Irish literature. These shared preoccupations can be grouped under the broad, and contested, headings of ‘queerness’ and ‘transnationalism’, concepts which are inextricably interconnected in their fiction. Both Bowen and O’Brien participate in a dual subversion of political certainties through their dissolution of intersecting identity categories, both national and sexual.

Furthermore, a queer feminist reading of twentieth‐century Irish fiction must be attentive to bonds between women (erotic or otherwise, following Adrienne Rich’s theory of the lesbian continuum). It is through a close reading of female characters, and the relationships between them, in Bowen’s and O’Brien’s novels that their queer transnational project becomes visible. ‘Strangeness’, expressed as the intersection of lesbian sexuality and cultural/national foreignness or hybridity, is central to the articulation of non‐normative identities in their novels. A powerful sense of dispossession, alienation and detachment surrounds the female protagonists of Bowen and O’Brien, marking them out as queer, and thus a threat to heteronormative stability. In many ways they become akin to the Kristevan ‘abject’; that which disturbs and challenges the limitations, borders and categories established by societies in pursuit of cultural intelligibility.

This deconstructive impulse is key to the vision of modernity expressed by these innovative writers. The ‘Catholic‐agnostic’ O’Brien’s focus is an often polemical critique of Irish insularity and an expansion of the possibilities of modern Irish womanhood in an era in which these were being delimited and curtailed by the nationalist state authorities. For Bowen, writing from the conflicted subject‐position of Anglo‐Ireland post‐independence, queerness permeates her texts on a stylistic level, through distortions of time and space, inarticulate female characters chafing against linguistic constraints and a complicated interplay of past and present. Despite their obvious differences, approaching O’Brien and Bowen through the lens of poststructuralist theory sheds new light on the persistent queerness of Irish women’s writing.

This has clear political implications for independent Ireland’s self‐image, challenging the accepted modernisation narrative of Irish culture. Voices of dissent were present from the early years of the Irish Free State, refusing to allow Ireland to be closed off from European cosmopolitanism and emphatically articulating possibilities of queer Irishness despite the displacement of ‘deviant’ sexualities into foreign contexts. This project seeks to reclaim the radical deconstructive potential of Irish women’s literary modernism by mobilising queer theory as a productive way of reading the subversive female characters of Bowen and O’Brien’s fiction. I argue that both of these writers participate in a postmodern literary aesthetic ‐ a queer deconstructive feminism ‐ not only dissolving confining binary identity categories for their protagonists, but also distinctions between the modern and the postmodern.

Panel 8a | Quare Modernism: Irish Sexualities

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley (University of Oxford) ‘like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses’: Modernist Eyedentity.

In the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Bloom’s recognition of Gerty’s limp prompts an intriguing – and somewhat troubling – train of fetishistic thought relating to gender, disability, religion, race, and sexuality: A defect is ten times worse in a woman. But makes them polite. Glad I didn't know it when she was on show. Hot little devil all The same. Wouldn't mind. Curiosity like a nun or a negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate. Taking Bloom’s linking of ‘nun’, ‘negress’, and ‘glasses’ as my point of departure, in this paper I consider intersectional identities in modern literature through the lens (pun very much intended) of glasses-wearing. Glasses, like modernist texts, embody and elicit a wide range of meanings. They can be viewed as an object (a vision aid or piece of jewellery) or as an enabling part of a person’s subjectivity (an extension of the perceptual faculties) – they allow their wearer to more easily and efficiently engage with worldly objects and other subjects. Glasses alter their wearer’s perception by enabling them to see the world more clearly (in a literal sense), but they also cloud or distort their wearer’s perception of themselves (their self-identity) as well as colouring or warping other people’s perceptions of them (their perceived identity). Given their polysemousness – and their ability to agitate binaries such as object/subject, self/other, perceiver/perceived, disability/enhanced ability – it is unsurprising that modern(ist) writers regularly employ glasses as a device or theme, especially when writing about issues of identity. This paper explores a variety of modern texts, including detective stories, novels, experimental fiction, and experimental poetry. I consider Sherlock’s Holmes’s assertion that a person’s glasses provide the key to their identity: ‘“it would be difficult to name any articles which afford a finer field for inference than a pair of glasses”’ (Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez’, 1904). I investigate the relationship between racial identity and glasses-wearing in Arthur Miller’s novel Focus (1945): ‘The glasses did just what he feared they would do to his face’ – ‘he was looking at what might very properly be called the face of a Jew’. I examine the role that glasses play in the discrepancy between Miriam’s self-identity and perceived identity in Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915), comparing Miriam’s hope that her glasses make her look ‘like a teacher’ with the encounter between her and Pastor Lahmann in which the state of Miriam’s eyesight prompts pity with undercurrents of eroticism. Lastly, I identify and analyse some of the sexual and gender-blurring connotationns in Gertrude Stein’s ‘EYE GLASSES.’ (Tender Buttons, 1914).

Panel 8b | Straight Edge: Normalcy, Ordinariness, The Middlebrow

Daisy Lee (Independent) ‘ – what was it? The echo of a queer, muffled rumour’: The Poetics of Silence in Lesbian ‘Middlebrow’ Fiction, 1930-1940.

After the First World War and at the time of the banning of The Well of Loneliness a growing number of lesbian-themed ‘middlebrow’ novels began to appear. As the antithesis of modernism, this mainstream format suited many budding lesbian authors by giving them access to a vast and hungry female audience. In this paper I focus on three little known texts that arose in the wake of The Well: Gladys Sheila Donisthorpe’s Loveliest of Friends!, Hilda Wyndham’s Do They Remember? and Angela du Maurier’s The Little Less. Born out of a severe deficiency of established lesbian narratives, these authors create lesbian identities and relationships without the acknowledgment and acceptance of society, or a language that could provide a space for them. This year marks the 50 th anniversary of the (albeit limited) decriminalisation of homosexuality. But this criminalisation only ever affected gay men. There is no mention of lesbians in the Sexual Offences Act until as late as 2001 when Parliament decided that lesbians existed and gave us an age of consent. This absence of acknowledgment meant lesbians and bisexual women were never persecuted but it also lead to invisibility and gave women nothing to fight against. At the time these authors were writing, between the 1920s and ‘30s, there was no such thing as a ‘lesbian’ in fiction or in politics. I explore how the authors’ battles to write, publish, and receive recognition for their work were closely tied to the silence surrounding female homosexuality in the early twentieth century. This suppression manifests itself in the texts through visible and formal silences. The former marks literal silences where a character is described as silent, can’t finish their sentence, or leaves the conversation. The latter leaves blanks, inviting the reader into the text, where an experience, feeling or identity cannot be communicated, in the hope that they will partake in the continuation of a ‘plurality of lived lesbianisms’. 1 Using Elizabeth Loevlie’s theory on the poetic nature of silence and Patricia Laurence’s feminist reclamation of silence I interrogate the authors’ literary and political use of silence as a tool for lesbian expression and affirmation. ‘Middlebrow’ fiction has, until recently, been dismissed as an art form, in part because it was historically ‘written and consumed by women’ 2 , popular and accessible. Using Nicola Humble’s assessment of the ‘middlebrow’ as a style that held the power to subvert sexual norms, I argue that the ‘middlebrow’ aided these authors by giving them an innocuous space in which they could play around with what female sexuality meant and present it to as many women as possible. These texts offer us a complex insight into what the life of a lesbian or bisexual woman might have been like in the early twentieth century. This paper seeks to analyse the ways in which these authors used fiction to construct new identities as well as how they galvanised silence as a weapon to counter this political and cultural absence.

Panel 8b | Straight Edge: Normalcy, Ordinariness, The Middlebrow

Ben Nichols (University of Edinburgh) Normal Queerness: The Lesbian Middlebrow and the Desire to be Ordinary.

Some of the most interesting recent work in queer theory has questioned what have been taken to be the defining assumptions of the field. Books by scholars such as Lee Edelman, Heather Love, Judith Halberstam and Kadji Amin have looked to ideas that have often seemed backward, unhelpful or beyond the pale of properly queer endeavour in order to question aspects of the field's self- understanding. Perhaps no assumption is more defining for queer thought than the belief that normativity in all its forms is what proper queers should be opposing. Yet, in their 2015 special issue of differences, Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth Wilson also take queer theory to task on this front, interrogating the enduring commitment to anti-normativity in order to explore what kinds of thought it precludes. This paper will build on this latter work in particular. But instead of questioning anti-normativity solely via the protocols of theoretical debate, I will put pressure on it by exploring a literary aspect of the queer past: a tradition of "lesbian middlebrow" writing that not only presented desire between women in explicit relation to ordinariness and normality, but did so in a formal register that eschewed experimentation in favour of appeal to the mainstream and the masses.

I will focus on two writers who exemplify this early-twentieth-century tradition: Radclyffe Hall and Mary Renault. To take perhaps the most famous example, in The Well of Loneliness (1928), Hall’s lesbian protagonist Stephen Gordon has an “inherent respect of the normal” and spends the entire novel endeavouring to win acceptance within the terms of a dominant culture. Hall's earlier novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) describes the failure of Joan Ogden to break with convention and establish a life with her female lover Elizabeth Rodney: like Stephen, Joan is convinced of the value of a normal life and the shelter from violence that it affords. Mary Renault's The Friendly Young Ladies (1944) frequently explicitly draws attention to the ordinariness of the lesbian relationship of Leo Lane and Helen Vaughan, the ladies of the novel's title. Indeed, it is only the novel's heterosexual characters who glamorize and exoticize Leo and Helen's life together. Moreover, both Renault and Hall were and are recognised as squarely middlebrow writers, concerned, in formal terms, with appealing to ordinary readers. I will argue that the value of these works is that they present lesbianism in a desired relation to normality and ordinariness and thereby enable an argument that seems deeply counterintuitive from the vantage point of contemporary theory: that in certain contexts, feeling normal and ordinary have been very important for queer people. Moreover, turning to the fiction of this period allows us to put pressure on current theory, not solely in a theoretical register (with no intention at all of denigrating such a register), but by tuning in to some of the real uses of ordinariness in the contexts of lives often defined by marginalisation and violent censure.

Panel 8b | Straight Edge: Normalcy, Ordinariness, The Middlebrow

Ellen Ricketts (University of Hull) Queering the Modernist Bildungsroman: Lesbian Identity and Narrative Development.

This paper looks at the use of the Bildungsroman genre by lesbian writers in the early twentieth century. There has been a recent upsurge in scholarly attention to the experimental uses that modernist writers have made of the Bildungsroman, yet the question of queer gender and sexuality remains somewhat overlooked. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, the bildungsroman genre has been used to represent the maturation of a lesbian protagonist through the stages of self-recognition and community, leading to its conflation with the “coming-out” narrative. So far, however, little critical attention has been given to writers’ use of the genre prior to the consolidation of lesbianism as an available identity category. This paper takes the Bildungsroman as the genre most capable of narrative humanism, which educates its readers by portraying the development of a subject, and considers its powerful potential as a mode of representation for a subject that was beginning to lay claim to a public identity. Moreover, it does so by looking at texts that predate the cohesion of lesbian identity in narrative form in The Well of Loneliness in 1928 and considers what a lesbian version Bildung might look like in the decade and a half before the ostensible watershed moment of its publication. It looks at a survey of novels from the early part of the twentieth century, including the obscure semi-autobiographical narrative, Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul (1915) by Christopher St John (née Christabel Marshall), and Bryher’s Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923). It also examines the relationship between lesbianism and the Bildungsroman when the destabilising effects of non-normative gender and sexual identities, ones which are crucially still in process, impact upon the genre’s aesthetics. As a genre predominantly associated with realism, the Bildungsroman undergoes considerable “queering” as the new sexual subject it is called upon to contain puts pressure on its narrative conventions. Thus, we see a tension between realist tradition and modernist experimentation; progress and failure; public identity and personal desires; pride and shame; the socially constricted body and the mind; individual development and shared consciousness. Indeed, it is in the intersections between these various reference points that a specifically queer and modern identity begins to emerge. This paper unpacks the conflicted relationship between a genre that articulates the formation of identity, and queerness, which destabilises identity. It demonstrates how sexuality and subjectivity as a mutually- constitutive process can be understood through the lens of fluidity, the very fluidity that characterises the coupling of the term “queer” and “modernism”.

Panel 8c | Theatre Types: Performance and Performativity

Claire Mead (Independent) She’s Representing: The Emergence of a Modernist Lesbian Aesthetic in Paris and Berlin Cabarets of the Interwar Period.

The construction of lesbian identity in the Paris and Berlin of the interwar years was directly correlated from the new social and cultural influence women had been able to acquire during the First World War. Reclaiming masculine fashion as a symbol of the empowered modern woman was directly conflated with a rise in queer public spaces such as bars, cafés and cabarets in which women could find safe spaces to express themselves and exteriorise their love for women. Case studies of the lesbian cabarets le Monocle in Paris and Monbijou in Berlin during the late 1920s and early 1930s allow for an exploration of the way in which lesbian aesthetics were directly linked to their reclaiming of a presence within the public sphere. Accounts of the existence and particular resilience of these spaces and their customers in crafting women-only spaces is reinforced by their artistic documentations and interpretations. Brassaï's photographs of Le Monocle for his album Paris After Dark in 1932 are rare photographic testimonies to lesbian fashion at the time - showing an intriguing combination of sailor uniforms borrowed from gay masculine iconography and the emergence of "garçonne" fashion complete with cropped hair, suits and monocles, a style not only asserted by many outside the lesbian bar, but also vocally defended by women in the popular press. In many ways this reclaiming of masculine codes can be seen as the emergence of a quintessential lesbian butch fashion. However, Brassaï's depictions come from an outsider's viewpoint, ethnographically "documenting" nightlife and exotifying its queer components in the process. Similarly, aside from the number of caricatures by male artists present in periodicals such as La Vie Parisienne, expressing more "sapphic panic" or sexualisation than sincere support, it takes looking at the production of queer women artists from the period to understand the power and impact of queer lesbian spaces on a new idea of modernity for women steeped in a reclaimed sexuality, sense of community and overt resistance to oppressive gender and societal norms. Gerda Wegnerer and Tamara de Lempicka's depictions of women in the public sphere use the aesthetic of Art Deco and the codes of fashion imagery to craft glorified and confident portraits of women's queer interactions and attitudes. However it is Jeanne Mammen's depictions of the lesbian bar scene of Weimar Germany, including the Montbijou, which manage to capture the subversive and revolutionary spirit of these spaces. The presentation of her subjects with an agency and sexuality escaping the male gaze or glossy feminized idealisation showed the power of lesbian modernist culture as more than a modern trend, but an overly political tactic of visibility, allowing women across different social classes and backgrounds to experiment with ways of being self-sufficient and solidarous within their own subcultures and countercultures outside of patriarchal public spheres.

Panel 8c | Theatre Types: Performance and Performativity

Casey Lawrence (Brock University) Bloom Up To/At The Bar: Joyce’s Trip to the Wilde Side.

In James Joyce’s Ulysses, protagonist Leopold Bloom is put on trial, figuratively and literally, in order to expose the cycle of national violence against the perceived sexual/cultural Other in both the colonial English legal system and the court of public opinion. This paper will argue that Joyce’s Ulyssean “trials” are inspired by two real-life miscarriages of justice against Irishmen: the murder trial of Myles Joyce (about which Joyce wrote “Ireland at the Bar” in 1907) and the infamous Oscar Wilde Trials (discussed in Joyce’s essay 1909 “Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salomé”). Bloom is forced to defend himself against racial and sexual stereotypes when he encounters the Citizen at the Kiernan’s pub in “Cyclops” and is accused of cheapness. The episode emphasises themes of justice, libel, and xenophobia by putting Bloom on trial at the bar, and connecting him to the litigious character Dennis Breen (who, like Wilde, receives an inflammatory postcard), to Wilde’s libel suit, and to the execution of Myles Joyce. The Citizen demonstrates the Irish nationalist movement’s intolerance for the ethnic and sexual Other by drawing a connection between Bloom’s hybridity as “half and half” (U 12.1052), both Irish and Jewish, and perceived sexual ambiguity, through the misuse of “pishogue” (U 12.1055) as a homophobic slur. The nightmarish trial in “Circe” similarly parallels (or parodies) the Wilde Trials by exposing Bloom’s “perversions” in the courtroom. The trial in Nighttown simultaneously mocks the judicial system which ruined Wilde and demonstrates the true threat of legally sanctioned violence—the continuation of a colonial system which punishes the Other for its mere existence. The arm of the law—embodied by Privates Carr and Compton—turns Dublin’s red light district into a site of colonial authority amidst the sexual debauchery of the brothel space. The boundaries between public and private become blurred in the fantastic happenings of “Circe,” just as the space of the courtroom brought Wilde’s bedsheets into the public sphere for scrutiny. Bloom’s own dirty laundry is publicly aired when he is accused of sexual misconduct by various female characters; these accusations quickly lead to scrutiny of Bloom’s nationalism, as anti- Semitism infects (and affects) the trial of his alleged sexual deviancy. Bloom’s “public” humiliation for “private” indiscretions reveals the lack of delineation between the internal and external space in the “Circe” episode; unlike “Cyclops,” in which thinly veiled accusations are made in the public space of the bar, “Circe’s” ambiguous interiority implicates the public, rather than merely the individual, in the perpetuation of sexual, national, and colonial shame.

Panel 8c | Theatre Types: Performance and Performativity

Julie Richard (Université du Québec à Montréal) Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and her Queer Performances.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an interdisciplinary German artist best known for her work as a poet, sculptor and performer of the American avant-garde. At the beginning of the twentieth century, she was in touch with the Dadaïst circle of New York as well as Walter and Louise Arensberg, who organized exhibitions showcasing the dadaïst works of art. Freytag-Loringhoven had drawn the attention of the artistic group for her original and strong personality, and Marcel Duchamp among others was inspired by her irreverent attitude. Jane Heap, co-editor of literary magazine The Little Review, asserted that Elsa von Freytag was even a Dadaist before the birth of the artistic movement itself in Zurich in 1916, as her work already included an everyday experience of art. Even then, the Baroness was inspired by a pre-war American artistic milieu at odds with the European traditions, and conducive to artistic experimentation. She had an acute awareness that major socioeconomic shifts such as the industrialization, the rise of capitalism as well as the advent of consumerism all contributed to a phenomenon of standardization of the individuals and reinforced social schemes of conventions.

Based on several photographs and poems published in The Little Review, this paper will focus on some of Freytag-Loringhoven’s urban performances in New York from 1913 until 1923. Set in different public spaces and streets in Greenwich Village, her performances were thought of as act of resistance to social norms. For Elsa von Freytag, art had a transformative impact on daily life, allowing her to mock and critique postwar hygiene standards and new trends such as the use of perfume or breath freshener. This paper will discuss her aesthetic and political strategies to merge the private and public spheres through the introduction in her daily life of performance that allowed her to assert her queer identity and challenge female and male gender codes which define sexual identities. Among her aesthetic strategies, for instance, was the designing of the costumes she wore for her performances, such as a non-gendered circus outfit made up of junk objects, as a way to critique the object fetishism and the consumerism of her time.

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is now recognized as a pioneer of performance art in art history even though she was mostly misunderstood by contemporary colleagues and critics because of her distinctive personality and independent mindset. This paper will focus on her queer posture as well as the political motivations of her performances and provide a plural and intersectional reading of the artist, revealing how her queer identity and aesthetic were at the heart of both her artistic practice and her life approach.